Here's the blog post that explains the rules of this competition: https://blog.bitrefill.com/bitrefill-contest-fastest-phone-refill-on-earth-c721d4d6aff2?gi=82bba82fd868

This wasn't a test of raw network speed, bur rather a test of payment speed on the same platform called Bitrefill using different currencies.



It has nothing to do with opening a channel, which takes as long as confirming a transaction on chain, the channel is already created in this competition.

Ethereum and Monero are the best coins in your list. The rest are significantly worse, so you should only stick to these two.

When it comes to your crypto portfolio, it's extremely important to choose the right ratio between alts and Bitcoin. IMO Bitcoin should be at least 90% of your portfolio, anything lower than that is just an unnecessary risk. Bitcoin is the leader of this market and it only grows stronger as such, so you don't need to worry about alts outperforming Bitcoin by a wide margin. What you should be worried about is alts underperforming and dying, just by looking at the recent charts it's clear that they are way lower than their ATH, compared to Bitcoin which is only 50% down from it.

People very often talk about experience and knowledge on this forum, how they can help you make money from trading and investing, but I personally believe it's quite harmful. The reason for this is that newbies very often think that after doing a few weeks of their own research, which is likely just reading some poorly-written articles and blog posts, they become expert traders, investors, gamblers and so on.
The thing is, you need to be a real genius to make money from something like trading in a market like crypto, where there's so much manipulation going on, and where everything is purely speculative.
Better to earn money with honest work instead of wasting time and falling victim to scams that promise fast returns.

You're making here big statements like your conspiracy theory is a proven fact, but it's not. You even speak very vaguely, saying "government" and "legislators" without naming any countries or names. You show zero proof of government trading Bitcoin, which is necessary to prove your theory. And the price actually very rarely changes just because a country makes a statement about crypto.

You're talking about the show's fictional Ecoin, but Bitcoin was mentioned too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHOAKWzDH-Q&t=77

It's the evil and untrustworthy character that says that Bitcoin is partially controlled by China, but I don't remember any other character defending Bitcoin or portraying it in good light (other mentions of Bitcoin included a darknet market full of very illegal stuff), so I feel that the viewers of the show who are unfamiliar with Bitcoin did get a negative impression about it.

True, avatar and name won't help a shitposter, but they are important for good posters to become more recognizable and have higher engagement, including earning more merit. People usually don't read every single message in a thread, they scroll until their eye catches something interesting, like a word in a post. Avatars are great visual anchors, so they easily catch attention, so if a user interacted with you in the past, they will remember you by your avatar and will be more likely to stop and read your message.

You tried to make a lot of money in a short time and without doing anything. Everyone should know that this is impossible, and all such opportunities are just scams that lure people with unrealistic promises. If something it too good to be true, it is most likely a trap, this is the most important lesson when it comes to money and the internet.

Wrong. Don't try to game the merit system, it won't work. It's as likely to have the opposite effect - people will remember you as shitposter and merit farmer, because members who give merits can easily see through baiting attempts. The only way to make your name recognizable is consistently making decent posts for long periods of time. Choosing a good username and avatar helps a little bit too.

I specifically didn't write "full node" since you don't need to store the whole blockchain to implement this project, you can probably even configure Bitcoin Core or other client for this, or even use third-party API's, though that would probably have too much latency.

I didn't like this show and dropped it during season 2 or 3, but if I remember correctly, it on multiple occasions stated that Bitcoin is controlled by China or the White Rose or whatever. If it's indeed like that, than the show is really sending the wrong message about Bitcoin by contributing to this annoying misconception that Bitcoin is centralized or even theoretically can be controlled by a single entity.

Most of these "developers" are also scammers who just seek to take those ICO/IEO money and disappear, so they are more than happy with whatever terms the exchanges have. You are right with your first point - good coins don't need to pay for listing, I'm sure Litecoin or Etherem didn't pay any exchange ever.

If you're a honest dev, then you shouldn't worry if your coin isn't listed on exchange, Bitcoin didn't have any exchanges for the first few years, people did p2p trading and it was okay. Focus on writing good code, everything else will come on its own if your code is really good.

Definition of Asset Class from Investopedia:


Goldman Sachs might personally not like Bitcoin, they might be right that Bitcoin doesn't have all those properties that they like to see in investments, but there's absolutely no reason to say that it's not an asset class. Currency is an asset class too, anything is an asset class if it can be consistently used for investments.

I never wrote anything like that, so I'll be speaking only theoretically.

You need to run a node that listens to new transactions, it should match the output addresses of all new transactions against this database of compromised addresses, when it finds a match the program will make a CPFP transaction with high fee that spends the unconfirmed output. This transaction would ideally be pushed directly to miners, instead of relying on normal propagation. If this method fails, you can try to wait for the transaction to get 1 confirmation and then try to sweep it.

It actually would interesting to look at the addresses of the victims of this fraud, if the coins get stolen in the same block as the incoming transaction, then the thieves use the CPFP method and you should do the same to have a chance to beat them.

Great job, there can be a lot of hidden opportunities in this forum that people aren't aware of because they don't look for them, as the devote all their time to sig campaigns and bounties. When I was just starting on this forum, I was wisiting the Securities board and made a bit of profit with the opportunities presented there. I wouldn't recommend it to others though, as the risk of ponzis and exit scams is too high, but what I can recommend is that if you know languages other than English, try checking your local section occasionally if you don't do this already, they often have job offers and other opportunities that don't get posted in main sections (this is also how I earned money a few times when I was a beginner).

PRO:

Bitcoin is not a company, so it doesn't have to apply for permits to operate, meaning it was a global currency since the day it was launched. Even if a country bans Bitcoin, this ban is impossible to fully enforce.

CON:

Price volatility. Makes it impractical to use as a currency for most merchants and users.

The first rule of investing is to never invest more than you can afford to lose. I don't know how high is your personal risk tolerance, but advising people to invest as much as they can can be pretty irresponsible, it's never a good idea to put all your savings in one place, especially if it's so speculative and volatile.

People shouldn't look at others to decide how much they should invest, no one needs to own 1 BTC or 2.1 BTC or 21 BTC, those amounts are completely arbitrary. Don't try to apply to yourself the standards of western people with their $100k salaries if you are from a third world country.

You need to understand that there's no such thing as a single mempool, every node has it's own and they can easily modify the default behavior if they want to. When a transaction disappears from block explorer, it means that it was delete from mempool(s) to which the block explorer connects. Some other mempools might still keep this transaction, and it might even get confirmed at some point if it reaches miners.

It's impossible to tell what was the reason in that particular case, especially since it's a shitcoin - maybe miners didn't like such a low fee and didn't include it even though they had empty space in blocks, maybe it's some bug, maybe some nodes tried to censor that transaction by refusing to propagate it.

You probably read some articles or conversations that speculated that in the future Bitcoin's cap might be increased if the community will decide that it's needed. There is some truth to it, because technically it can happen, but right now we have absolutely no idea if it will happen or not. So far no one is seriously talking about increasing the cap or making Bitcoin inflationary. And such chain would create a network split known as a fork, so if not everyone is onboard, then there would be multiple competing versions of Bitcoin.

This is why Lightning Network exists. Small transactions will be happening there most of the time, large value transfers will still happen onchain, and in this case network fee won't be a problem, it would be comparable or smaller than what fiat systems are offering.

They didn't say that it's not a viable investment, they said they don't recommend it to their clients who are looking to hedge themselves against the impact of covid-19 on the economy. They admitted that Bitcoin is a viable option for speculators. I don't see what's wrong with this statement, everyone knows that Bitcoin is so volatile that any fundamental behavior related to fiat economy is barely noticeable in short term.