It's impossible to tell what the "invention of the Century" is when we're less than a fifth of the way through it.  Unless of course you have a very good time machine.

By the time that it would be reasonable to have an opinion on the subject (83 years from now), most of the people commenting on this thread will be dead and their opinions will be long irrelevant.

Of course this is just another one of those "hey, you people are on a Bitcoin forum, I guess you like Bitcoin then?" kind of threads which will probably get 1000+ replies within a week because of how interesting the completely bullshit premise is.  I'd better give up having any reasonable discussion here.

Unless you're reliant on signature campaigns in order to sustain your lifestyle (which you certainly shouldn't be) or you're reliant on them to pay obligations such as debt (which you certainly shouldn't be) this wouldn't be a problem.

Campaign managers are real people, not robots.  The managers that have been robots, such as the YoBit campaign, haven't worked out very well in terms of post quality.

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While they're out doing normal human activities, it's important that the funds are as safe as possible, so it's much better that the funds are kept at home in appropriate places rather than on their phone whenever they're walking around.  DarkStar_ paid two weeks at once a while ago because he wasn't at home, which is good unless you want the funds to actually be lost.

You don't seem to understand what theft is either.

If you were paying any attention to what crypto actually is, perhaps you'd think differently.  Especially since satoshi literally wrote a political message into the first block ever to be mined.

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A somewhat unfortunate aspect of crypto is that having more money gives you quite significantly more power.  Nodes?  Just run a lot of them.  Miners?  Just run a lot of them.  Community?  Spoof the support and try to gain control of major media.

The network gets harder to attack as it grows but if richer people ever all have similar interests, the public could be misled into using a new chain with a raised supply or other features (or they'd lose money by staying on the old chain with much less economic support).

A ponzi scheme is reliant on a centralised ledger because it requires the "company" to manage which people it pays at which time and which money it can put in its pocket.  You're correct about that part.

However, tulip bulbs are not reliant on a centralised ledger, they are simply an object.  The benefit of having block space is that you can say "I have BTC which is worth X amount" - in the same way, you can show someone a tulip bulb and as long as they know what it is, they recognise that you own it (this is entirely decentralised, just like gold and other offline transfers of goods).

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The distinction between a Ponzi scheme and Bitcoin is entirely objective and obvious, so it's utterly ridiculous to compare the two as it would just be referring to natural supply and demand as a Ponzi scheme.  

However, tulip bulbs rely on this same supply and demand, so to call it a similar economic bubble is subjective and there is certainly an argument to be made on that side.

Silk Road had very little effect and it recovered extremely quickly.  The bear market's biggest cause was the gradual collapse of the exchange Mt. Gox which handled the majority of trading volume at the time.  Other darknet markets tend to just replace the ones which collapse.
The Silk Road and Mt. Gox collapses were temporary problems because people can always move to a new exchange or new darknet market.  Moving to a new country where there are fewer regulations is quite a different matter.  Furthermore, people tend to ignore the November fork, which is a much larger potentially bearish event that's coming up quite soon.

There's no point trying to recognise exact patterns of events because they don't last forever.  However, I do believe that Chinese problems are just hiccups to regulation being handled properly, in which case you might have a point.
If you're running a business, you'll have to comply with all the necessary regulations in your country.  It has no relation to Bitcoin's decentralisation, because centralised companies are not the same.

This isn't about Bitcoin as a project, it's about the actual coins that are held in the blockchain and who has access to them (which we're calling ownership).
Generally, it's the top 1% that's called the top 1%.  That's in the name.

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I would imagine that crypto is somewhat centralised in terms of holders, because getting in early meant that an amount that previously seemed trivial ended up being a noticeable percentage of a huge economy (due to the rapid price increases).

Eventually, that will balance itself out as early adopters spend, sell or do something else that brings the money back into ordinary circulation.

You're using the price to justify your positive view on Bitcoin.  That means that if the price were falling, you would not consider Bitcoin to be "bulletproof" and you would most likely think that it's terrible since you have no reasoning behind your opinion except for the price.

Also, you're trying to claim that Bitcoin will last forever based on the price, so you're incorrectly conflating the security of Bitcoin with the price.

Bitcoin will last for as long as someone in the world wants to use it, but the price is not why it survives and the price is largely propped up by speculation at the moment.

I'm expecting a bear market after this bulltrap.

Their domain was registered only about two weeks ago and they only bothered to register the domain for one year, which implies that they're keeping the costs of running their scam site to an absolute minimum.

The address and email on their whois information doesn't match the address and email on the "Contact Us" page of their site.  Also, the address on their "Contact Us" information hardly looks like the office of a professional company that has had millions of ETH transactions sent from it like they claim they have.

There are also clear typos, so it looks very much like a lazy site.  I signed up with fake info, and it says "Totala balance" in the wallet, as well as "Registration Successfully" when you sign up.

On their settings, you have a language option, but the only language you can actually choose is English.

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So yeah, looks like you've been scammed.  If you want an online Ether wallet, try MyEtherWallet (and make sure to avoid phishing sites - the real domain is myetherwallet.com and check it carefully).

Because the systems for producing fiat money in Europe and the US are not sustainable.  Money is largely created on the spot when people take out loans from banks, and money can be created at a whim.  It's this sort of irresponsible system which caused hyperinflation in Zimbabwe, to the point at which people's money literally became worthless.

Originally fiat money was redeemable for gold, which is why the people did not mind it losing some value - they knew that at least it can't go completely ridiculous and collapse altogether very easily.

BTC is a rebellion against now-worthless fiat money, because it has the scarce and free properties of an asset while being transferable as a currency.  It removes the need for people to trust a government with their asset.

Electric cars are a very good analogy actually.  Electric cars were created because the system of using petrol cars is unsustainable and humans will run out of petrol not too long from now.  I guess you could say that they were created as a contingency plan of sorts against petrol cars.

When petrol cars are no longer practical to be used (such as when a financial crisis is caused by people decreasing their debt to banks, or there is a "run on the bank"), people will have no choice but switching to electric cars (representing gold, Bitcoin or both).  Bitcoin is also like electric cars in that it's a new development of technology rather than an existing item like gold.

That's objectively not what a pyramid scheme is.  You're just describing supply and demand.
Explain how people would exchange one form of money to another without literally exchanging one form of money to another.  There isn't any other way.

People having 40 years of experience in a field does not suddenly make them idiots or incapable of understanding new things.
Have you seen the Bitcoin graph from late 2013 to early 2014?  The pattern is quite similar, only now we're dealing with higher prices.  The dotcom bubble also had a similar graph with a slight rebound before a dramatic crash.

I'm not saying that the past necessarily predicts the future, nor am I saying that you must be wrong - I'm just saying that if it is a bull trap, this is exactly what it would look like.
Me too, but traders don't act based on logic when they get caught in a bubble.  It's happened time and time again but no one learns their lesson.

On the bright side, maybe this will help some good decentralised exchanges to get developed in China.  All they have to do is start an ICO for it. /s

Seriously, it looks like the market could get quite a bit more bearish over the next couple of months due to the November hard fork and these problems.  This looks like a bulltrap to me, so I'm going to continue spending my coins in case it drops further.

-If I understand it correctly, Apple Pay payments are subject to the credit card merchant fees, which at times can be extremely high.  Bitcoin does sometimes have relatively high fees but the technology can enable lower fees in the future, which is part of satoshi's intention.

-BTC payments are in BTC and not in fiat.  Fiat is intrinsically worthless in its current state and is not backed by anything.

-BTC payments do not rely on Apple and credit card intermediaries to prevent double spends.

-Because BTC payments do not have an intermediary, they are irreversible.

Surely you must be bullshitting here.  No one could be stupid enough to invest ~$500k based on Reddit posts, could they?  Am I just underestimating the craziness of humanity?
Realistically, 3-4 years after the bear market has ended and we're deep into the next cycle.  It's possible that the price will temporarily rebound to there very soon, but I doubt it will last long until the next bull market.

But a doomsday scenario, as ridiculous as it sounds, is always possible enough for it to be crazy to invest your life savings into just BTC.

To clear up false information:
On August 1st (the release date) it was wavering between 0.085 and 0.15 according to coinmarketcap.  When blocks began to be mined, it reached higher.  The lowest it reached was 0.065 but that was after a crash.  
They lose percentages as quickly as the market's perception of their value changes.  If people were bullish on Bitcoin Cash, the price would be rising in BTC terms, but currently it's relatively stable.
GoDaddy explicitly doesn't accept Bitcoin.
True, but it's important to note that these remove many of the most important benefits of using crypto.Seems like a pretty neutral assessment /s
I don't think there are any objective statistics for how many merchants accept BTC, so there's no way of judging that.  There are no major merchants accepting Bitcoin Cash that I know of.

Goldman Sachs were suggesting that it could go down to around $2200 before it begins recovering.

It's possible that Bitcoin could follow the typical bubble graph, in which case it could fall significantly lower than the expected price due to people panicking excessively and then reach a normal point.  In 2015 the "normal point" turned out to be around $250.

This time it'll probably be higher than that, but you can't expect it to stay consistently above $2000 when that price has only held for a small fraction of this year, never mind for a long time.  You just have to be prepared to hold through proper panic, which could reach well under $1000 for all we know.

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IMO we're entering a broader bear market which will become more serious due to the November fork.

In the bear market as a whole, the value dropped from $1180 to below $200.  $1180 to $200 is a reduction of roughly 83%, so you would be losing more than four fifths of your coins' value if you held throughout that period.  In some BTC bear markets it's been even worse.

The trick is putting your coins (the ones that you're not using regularly) in cold storage somewhere that it would take a while to access them, so it takes a lot of thought to dump them and it's not subject to short-term emotions from price movements. 

If you have enough savings that you can still live comfortably if you lose all the coins, HODLing shouldn't be too difficult.

This is certainly a potential application for the Lightning Network.  When good LN wallets become used regularly on mainnet, it's certainly something you should consider implementing.

Until then, you could try offering a discount equal to the fees that your credit card charges you for receiving funds in exchange for a service, plus the rough fees and effort that it would take for you to buy BTC with fiat.  If you want to lose money from your transactions you can make it higher, but this is the basic value of you receiving BTC transactions.  In some scenarios this can be quite significant.

The transaction time is not a problem if you ensure that your clients pay an appropriate fee, because by the time the massage is done the transaction should be confirmed.

There is not, will not, and should not be a centralised BTC "association" which gathers funds from the network instead of having a free open source project.

An example of this system being attempted is DASH.  10% of the block reward is set aside to pay developers as long as a centralised group of masternodes agree with the proposals.

It's extremely difficult to make it clear what the community's consensus is, which is why it's important that funds come to project voluntarily from people who support different proposals for the Bitcoin network and that the proposals are developed accordingly.

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It's also important to note that anyone could continue running a client supporting the old consensus rules which doesn't allow your ill-thought out ideas to come to fruition.

Since I got into the game a bit late and I don't have shitloads of disposable income, it's not so great for me.  But I'm not invested in any shitcoins or ICOs so I'm not particularly concerned about China banning ICOs or anything like that.

My only concern is the November hard fork and I have a fair bit of confidence that it'll sort itself out even though the consensus isn't completely clear.

Anyway, at least I have the opportunity to buy more when I can.  I'm certainly not panicking anyway.