It is rational to want to spread out your funds, but storing bitcoins on a centralized platform, may not be the best option. You can try downloading a non custodial wallet and keeping a portion of your assets there, preferably on an airgapped device.

Also, on your hardware wallet you can explore with addresses available by adding passphrases to your original seed phrase, thereby creating a new address where you can store a portion of your funds. Your added passphrase can be made as strong as possible with the use of alphabets, numbers and special characters. You then create a backup for the different addresses and store them in different locations.
Although, if your hardware device is compromised, it could potentially affect all your addresses (some other member can confirm this, as I'm not certain)

I do not, and also do not intend to. Imo, If one has access to buy Bitcoin directly without regulatory hassles then that would be the best option.

PayPal integrated four cryptocurrencies into its platform; Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash.
Also, the cryptocurrency market is heavily dependent on Bitcoin as the major asset with a dominance of about 63.7% as at this time, so when there is a spike in the value of Bitcoin, it has a tendency to influence some altcoins and carry them along same way when it crashes. I however expect a decoupling of the crypto market overtime and bull runs would likely become less synchronized.

I understand the argument of services like PayPal acting as a bridge to connect Bitcoin to users who are on the fence or doubtful about investing. Centralized adoption is not the ideal route for a decentralized asset, but increasingly seems to be the cost to get Bitcoin mainstream.
Bitcoin is not associated with any scam project AFAIK, everyone should endeavor to do their own research.

It is possible. During the last ATH rally in 2017, it was not until the end of November that Bitcoin surpassed $10,000 but at this point now it is already testing the $16k resistance level. The value of Bitcoin is unpredictable, but we could very well see a new All Time High before the end of they year.

Regardless of who emerges victorious, it would have little effect on the Bitcoin market overtime. Afaik, neither candidates has interest in aggressive policies which influences Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. Some parties even suggest that Biden's policy on tax and money printing would shift more people into Bitcoin.

Cryptocurrency: Bitcoin
Dollar amount: $15
Bank Name: Guarantee Trust Bank
Account Name: **sent**
Account Number: **sent**

Edit: txid - a5498e3bcc76550022d47f18be97dc66565c9227c749c76546b62a7611df38b1

*Funds received. It's always a pleasure.

The market is largely unpredictable and there is no one factor which causes a bull run, there has been lots of organic growth over the last few months (before and after the halving) which was capable of building bullish sentiment in the Bitcoin space, but without any significant effect on the market value;

• Microstrategy adopted a Bitcoin standard
• Grayscale increased their Bitcoin AUM and hold about 2.4% of total supply
• PayPal integrated Bitcoin into its platform
• A number of other public companies bought and hold Bitcoin.
So, this can be viewed as a price correction with the market value closing the gap to match sentiments of traders and holders.

Imo, Bitcoin has been undervalued for a while now and had the potential to spike up at anytime, but with no certainty on when; Guess we are there now.

Merit sources like most other users have boards they frequent, and they are appointed on this basis. A source who is active on a couple of boards would majorly distribute merits there, you wouldn't expect them to venture into sections they have little knowledge of as they would not be able to discern which post is quality and which is not.
Also quality is subjective, if you find 50-100 good posts per hour you can report then here - [self-moderated] Report unmerited good posts to Merit Source.

If you're going to make this accusation, you should show some sort of proof, otherwise it's just baseless trolling.

There's no guarantee the individual is on this platform or that they'd see your thread here. It is also not good practice to try reaching out in this manner as you expose yourself to scammers who can impersonate the person you're searching for.
If you do not trust a site to trade on it, then avoid it completely, there are a number of other ways to buy and sell bitcoins.

Firstly, theymos is the forum administrator, not the global mod.
About smerit for sources, I do not think most of them fail to use up their stash, some do due to inactivity or failure to find enough merit worthy posts which meets their criteria.

The forum does not expect anyone to be a hero (whatever that is in this context), there are just a set of rules which guides the activity on the forum, and failure to keep to those rules attracts some level of punishment. Asides this, the forum is designed to be as free as possible and to accommodate the various interests of members.
Some members have gotten permanent bans reduced to signature bans on the merit of their overall contribution to the forum, so that counts for something.

My exact thoughts.
Inflation is not just a decrease in the value of a currency due to supply shock or scarcity of products, but it is equally represented as an increase in the price of goods. So, if the value of Bitcoin goes up when priced against the USD due to inflation, the price of products purchased by the USD would have also increased to counter this change.

Bitcoin can be used as a hedge to escape hyper inflation, but inflation does not directly make Bitcoin more valuable imo. Think of it as a balance scale, with two weights on each side; if one gets lighter, the balance shifts, as the other one pulls the scale towards its arm without any increase in its weight.
Hopefully in the future, Bitcoin would be priced against actual products and work hours, rather than against fiat currencies.

There are a number of books related to Bitcoin and which can be useful for beginners, Look up;
• Mastering Bitcoin, and
• Bitcoin for dummies
They should both be available on Amazon.

There's a thread by yazher which contains links to Bitcoin related books - Blockchain Books, Bitcoin Movies And Documentaries (Updated), it was last updated in 2019, but the content is still relevant.

As an individual, you can simply come to the realization that Bitcoin is a good investment and go right ahead to find ways to buy, for a public company with board of directors, it doesn't quite work that way, if one or more of the board members fancy Bitcoin as a good investment, they would need to spend some time explaining to the others why they think Bitcoin it is as well as going over the pros and cons, after which the next step would be the paperwork; buying at such a scale will take lots of preparations to be done right, I would assume a lot of companies are seriously considering Bitcoin, in addition to those that have already adopted a Bitcoin standard.

Are you referring to this; JPMorgan Chase & Co. Agrees To Pay $920 Million in Connection with Schemes to Defraud Precious Metals and U.S. Treasuries Markets? It was not related to Bitcoin claims.

As said above, Grayscale does not invest directly in bitcoin, they manage a host of funds for investors who cannot directly hold bitcoins, due to legal reasons, they also manage altcoins like Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, litecoin and a host of others.
If you are interested in assessing companies who are purchasing Bitcoin, you can check out this spreadsheet made by Fillippone;

What do you mean; 'keep the value'. Relatively stable assets like gold are not evenly distributed as they are available for anyone, and individuals with more fiat can purchase more, same thing in Bitcoin.

Bitcoin can be used as a store of value for anyone who is interested, we have seen strong adoption in countries which have been hit by economic crisis, such as Turkey.
Also, Bitcoin cannot be termed expensive or scarce, its value is speculative and depends on market factors, which is dependent on the fundamentals of Bitcoin, if more people come to the realization of the qualities of Bitcoin, demand will go higher and so would the value, some would say it is undervalued at the current price.

This tweet by Michael Saylor is relevant here;


I can't think of a perceived disadvantage in Bitcoin's protocol without a sufficient reason for that which makes the network unique.
One of the comment new members make often is that: 'Bitcoin is too complex to understand as opposed to the centralized financial sector', this however is necessary to create a decentralized system which is fully controlled by the holder, if one is going to have autonomy of their finances then they have to make the effort to understand how it works.

High fees also presents an issue from time to time, but this depends on your perspective; One who makes a transaction in Bitcoin which is equivalent to $1billion can pay fees of about ~$3 which is relatively cheaper than virtually all other payment platforms, but such high transactions are not common and do not account for daily payments.
Greater adoption for 2nd layer platforms like LN and relevant BIPs can help solve scalability issues.

01. Best Moderator ................. mole0815, Welsh
 2. SpamBuster ..................... Coolcryptovator, Hhampuz (they pick the best participants for their campaigns, limiting the incentive for spammers)
 3. ScamBuster ..................... Rikafip
 4. Golden Feather ................. JayJuanGee
 5. Event of the Year .............. Bruno's exit
 6. Fail of the Year ............... Can't remember the exact user, but a newbie burst on the scene at a point this year (probably), making threads with alts and replying with his/her main account to get merits, worked for a while... until they were caught
 7. Discovery of the Year .......... Ratimov
 8. Bitcoin Geek ................... Pooya87, o_e_l_e_o
 9. Bitcointalk Ninja .............. LoyceV
10. Craft Master ................... Maus0728
11. Antihero ....................... Lauda
12. Absolute Hero of Good .......... The pharmacist
13. Miss Bitcointalk ............... Don't know

The increase in number of unconfirmed transactions and delay in confirmation was not due to the announcement by PayPal but it coincided with the spike in Bitcoin price which led to a bit of fomo, with transaction rate far excedding the average rate of confirmation (10 minutes).

This would only affect investors who are buying in during a spike and have to pay high fees to get their transactions confirmed. It is a cycle that has been repeated during each bull run or price correction when investors rush in to buy at a cheap rate. So this doesn't occur often, not enough to turn off investors in my opinion.

There are also other projects besides LN aimed at improving the efficiency of transactions and methods one can adopt to prepare for times when the network gets clogged so as to minimize the fee paid, such as consolidating inputs.

If a forum rule is created for confirmed scammers and is enforceable by the mods based on a certain criteria, wouldn't that make trust moderated?
What would determine a confirmed scammer may be a barrier; we have had debates even among top ranking members about correct use of feedback and flags, so such a restriction would lead to lots of drama.
It would also create a false feeling of security as other members would assume anyone who can pm them are less likely to scam.

P.S; I would suggest members with active flags have a warning banner show up when they message other members or newbies, below x days total log in time. I do not know if this is currently implemented, but it could help to protect forum members.

The fact that the account represents a business and not strictly for personal use would invalidate any change in ownership (not that it indemnifies one of blame), it is not uncommon for a website to have more than one person handling their marketing program on a particular media, so there's no unique identity behind the keyboard.
I see you left a neutral feedback, I would say there is enough reason for a negative in this case.

The profile still carries the name of the website and the current owner can still pm users who want to recover their funds and find a way to scam them despite the public change in posting habit.

This would depend on what metric you're looking at; Bitcoin's supply is the most stable of all the other asset classes which are used as reserve currencies, it is immune to supply shocks and fiscal policies are not implemented to adjust to changes in economics conditions. The protocol of Bitcoin would likely be the same 10 or 50 years from now.

You're are probably analysing volatility in the market price, Bitcoin is highly speculative with regular price fluctuations, but it is a decade old currency with lots of time to adapt and evolve to suit various markets. This volatility does not make it very suitable as a reserve asset now especially if the company is looking for stability; so those companies adopting it now are probably being forward thinking to get ahead of the curve (the value is generally appreciating, so in a couple of years it would likely be higher than it is now when compared with fiat or gold).

Also, you cannot only focus on one quality and use that to qualify an asset. Bitcoin has other unique attributes that makes it stand out and which are useful in a reserve currency.

There's something called KPI ~ Key Performance Indicators which companies use, it is usually used to measure the success or otherwise of the company in various areas where it can be measured. This means if a company has been running an ad using maybe signature promotion, for a couple of months they would know the success of it by checking traffic, number of unique visits etc, and overtime they would be able to build an average reach of that ad.

If they add a new promotion campaign which can not be directly quantified like Avatar, it would be possible to measure its influence by checking any changes in overall average reach; no change means no impact, an increase would mean a positive impact and a drop in the average reach would mean a negative impact. For example:

• Project X gets averagely 20,000 unique clicks monthly and 2,000 new registrations.
• After running an ad campaign, the average clicks after a couple of months increased to 30,000 and new registrations to 2,500. This indicates a positive impact.
There is a slight possibility that the change may have not been caused by the new ad and maybe better reach of the initial promotion, but as long as there was an increase it means the promotional campaigns are working and the company is satisfied.

If there is no information about the transaction (incoming or outgoing) in the wallet you included in OP then the transaction is not broadcasted yet. Contact the receiving address/service provider for more information.

This depends on the fees used as well as the status of the network at the time the transaction was broadcasted. A delayed transaction probably means that the fees included were too low and as such the tx was not given priority and is further off from the tip of the mempool.