It's a security measure from Bittrex.  When you access your account from home (or wherever you regularly access it from), you have a certain IP address which would usually stay the same.

If an attacker was trying to access your account, they would most likely be doing so from a different IP address, so Bittrex is trying to verify that it's really you who is trying to access your account.

It seems like they only added this recently.  They always used email verification for withdrawals, but since people have started manipulating funds in accounts for pump and dumps and other shady activity, Bittrex is just trying to keep your account safe.

Since it is you accessing your account, it's nothing to worry about and you should just do what Bittrex says to verify the new IP address (in my case, it was clicking a link in my email).

The ask price is the price that people want to sell it to you for.  When you want to buy, you choose the ask price.

The bid price is the price that people are willing to pay for it.  When you want to sell, you choose the bid price.

The last price is just the price that was used on the most recent trade.

It's important to note that you don't have to stick with those ask and bid prices though - you can set whatever price you want, but you just have to hope that someone fills your order.  That's why there is a gap between the ask and bid prices.
There could be two problems:

-The volume is too low in that trading pair for your order to be filled.
-You chose a different price than the bid price, so you have to hope that someone wants to fills your order

If you want your trade to be instant, take a look at the button that says "good 'til cancelled" and change it to "instant or cancel" so that the trade will be cancelled if it is not filled instantly.

The gold market is estimated to be worth between six and seven trillion dollars.

The crypto market, in total, is worth 168 billion dollars.  If we divide an estimate of 6.3 trillion by 168 billion, you can see that the crypto market is about 37 times smaller than gold.  It's also worth mentioning that most cryptocurrencies are not regarded as safe havens (the closest thing to a safe haven is BTC and even BTC isn't particularly safe).

When you consider the fact that the Bitcoin price has multiplied by about 4.5 since the start of the year, it starts looking quite a bit more dangerous and it doesn't seem like it's causing weak performance in the gold market at all.

How did you manage to get two things wrong in just one sentence?

-LN is not patented
-LN is nothing to do with lowering onchain transaction fees, that part will happen when people start sending SegWit transactions
Bait.

In the countries that I know of, BTC is already taxed when you convert it into fiat.  It's subject to capital gains tax, just like any other asset would be.  To be honest it would be pretty stupid for it not to be.
I don't see how this is new to you.  Significant personal possessions that you sell, for example antiques, would also be subject to CGT.  In some countries it's higher than 15%.

Frankly, you're very lucky it's exempt from VAT (in Europe at least, I don't know about the US).  If you want to sell it, try actually spending it at a merchant instead.

Bitcoin is not a stock and a split in BTC is not particularly similar to a split in a stock.

A split in Bitcoin can happen at any time and anyone can do it.  There is no one group that dictates when a BTC split happens, and there can be any number of splits that are utterly irrelevant because they have no support.

The only seriously bad scenario is if the new chain and old chain garner roughly the same amount of support.  I don't think the new chain has replay protection so everyone is pretty much screwed in that scenario.

When you have a famed billionaire who is respected by many thousands of people, most of which want to find out who they are, there's obviously going to be a lot of people exploiting the hype by creating lies and clickbait.

Clearly this article is bullshit.  The author has absolutely no evidence for the claims he's making.

Satoshi was hardly an idiot.  It's not like they would spend years working on a massive innovation and put lots of effort into staying pseudonymous but fail to understand what stylometry is.

Are you delusional?  We're talking about a large amount of people at real merchants paying with BTC, and they're complaining about BTC because it's not working well as a monetary system.

Somehow you're trying to argue that a large number of customers disliking BTC as a payment system would make it a better payment system.  With good money, people can do what they want, which is why physical cash is used so much for crime.

Last time I checked though, BTC is still used for the majority of darknet transactions.  I had a look at Alpha Bay a couple of months before it closed down out of curiosity, and most of the offers there were from people only accepting Bitcoin (although Alpha Bay had wallets for ETH, Monero and ZCash as well).

---

On first sight you'd think that CNBC actually knows what they're talking about.  Here are a couple of glaringly obvious errors in their article:
They imply that cryptocurrencies have "representatives" as if there's just one team that you can contact.  On the video, it just says that "Monero" didn't respond to their queries.
Bitcoin does not show the name of anyone.  What they mean is that it shows is a pseudonym called an address, which is far away from showing anyone's actual name.  Sure, people can often be traced, but BTC doesn't just reveal that information.

Yes.  You can use the same address multiple times and still receive funds to it.

However there are several problems with this, outlined in the Bitcoin Wiki article on address reuse.  You harm the privacy of others as well as just yourself.

If you do it, just make sure you understand the risks involved and the fact that address reuse is not an intended feature of BTC.  The only time when you would have to reuse addresses is when you receive payments from the same group at regular intervals and you don't give them a new address each time.

Depends what you're trying to get.  Personally I would have no real reason for altcoin trading other than getting more BTC and HODLing BTC, so I would certainly measure against the BTC price.

There's also the fact that alts are usually traded against BTC rather than against fiat, so altcoins' fiat value often rises and falls along with BTC as well, at least to some extent.

If you're looking to get fiat, then looking at the fiat price is fine, but usually you should be considering the returns you get from the altcoin compared to the returns you would have got by just keeping your BTC.

At the time there were not a lot of miners, so it is plausible that this entity mined several blocks in a day (which they did, the coins were often from several blocks mined in the same day).

It was not necessarily satoshi, just any miner.

It's plausible that this entity either moved their coins to a SW-compatible wallet for some reason, or it's plausible that this entity is trying to split their BTC and BCH.

What about people who aren't rich?  Are they supposed to be priced out of using BTC?

---

I agree with the principle of indiscriminately accepting transactions, but that wouldn't happen in practice - it opens up a significant attack vector.  If you were an attacker, you could send unlimited amounts of transactions and fill the whole blockchain with spam transactions - almost for free, because transactions would not be confirmed based on fees.

Of course there are various arguments about the merits and drawbacks of increasing the block size, but one thing that it can do is increase how expensive it is to spam the network.  For a spammer to get their transactions confirmed they have to pay a fee that makes that happen unless they're a major mining group that can selectively include spam transactions.

If I understand it correctly, SegWit uses newer P2SH (pay to script hash) addresses, which start with a three just like the ones that this person is sending to.

Rather than jumping to the conclusion that this early adopter is "cashing out", we could consider that they're moving their coins to SegWit-compatible wallets - something which people with the opportunity should certainly be doing.

At this point it's normal for even online wallets to offer access to your private keys at some point and less trust in their services.  Services such as Green Address, BitGo and Blockchain.info offer you at least some access to your private keys.

The only wallets that shouldn't do this are exchanges and wallets which try to interact with fiat in other ways (such as Xapo's debit card).  However, these things should be opt-in features which are distinct from the wallet service which they should be providing.

As for faucets, I suspect that they acted similarly to a "faucet cache" in that sense - receiving larger transfers of BTC at once from the faucet, and then adding the tiny amounts to users' accounts from the money they had already received from the faucet.

In that sense they would still be acting the same with faucets today as they were before, and they have become no less trustworthy.  The only difference is that the BTC transaction fees are now too high for them to cover on their own while still having a profitable business model.

Attacks become harder over a long time because developments in hardware can allow the blocksize to gradually rise, which means that they have to spend more to push the transaction fee up to the same amount.
Forks are irrelevant.  That's the market's decision.
Fair enough.  I would be using Monero by now though.
That's a good thing.  There are more than enough units because each coin is 100,000,000 units.
That happens naturally from the price.  If the price decreases, so does the difficulty.
Fair enough.  Those are scaling problems which will hopefully become less prominent with Lightning and other solutions.
That's always going to happen in an asset unless it is globally adopted.  The same thing happens with gold.

At least it's not just decreasing forever like fiat though.
?

Bitcoin fees are nothing to do with the amount being sent.  Had you sent a $10,000 transaction with the same number of inputs (probably one or two in this case), you would have had the same fee.  Bitcoin transaction fees are about the size of the transaction in bytes.

---

If you're concerned and you particularly need to send a smaller amount, you could just:

-Set a lower fee (one that will still get confirmed eventually)
-Use a transaction accelerator with a low-fee transaction
-Use a SegWit-compatible wallet such as the Ledger hardware wallet to send SegWit transactions and reduce fees.

Can you please stop making up numbers?  The rise to >$1000 was in 2013, not 2012.

Also, the price at the start of 2017 was $972 according to coinmarketcap.

---

Ignoring news and negative situations does not mean that BTC is more "resilient" than before.  It's important to recognise that some of this price rise has been caused by "new" money which was not aware of the previous situations BTC was in and they could still be weak hands for all we know.

It's more likely that the market thinks the positive news (particularly SegWit) outweighs the negative news for the time being.  This will not remain forever - as we know, there will always be bearish periods for assets.

---

IMO, the price will remain reasonably high until about mid-October.  Then it'll all be down to the outcome of the New York Agreement.

The main reason that gold was/is so valuable is basically just because it was an interesting asset with physical scarcity and governments could therefore use it to back fiat money (which of course they no longer do).

While I find it hard to believe that the whole global economy would switch over to a new asset, so I don't think this scenario would ever happen, it's important to recognise that volatility is not an inherent feature of BTC - it's just the situation which it is currently in.

Err, how do you think that buying billions and billions of dollars worth of BTC would theoretically affect the price?

IMO it mainly depends on how high the fees are relative to just spending BTC directly.

If you live in the US, you can buy most goods from actual BTC merchants or from Purse (excluding perhaps the most basic things like food, but personally I hold some fiat as well as BTC).

The fees would only be worth it if either you don't live in the US or Europe (a country with less BTC acceptance from merchants), or if you hold most of your savings in BTC and would use it a hell of a lot to make up for the crazy ordering fees.

Personally I live in Europe so I can just keep using my Xapo card.

Are you sure that you're capable of reading three paragraphs?

---

It's not a good idea to treat cryptocurrencies as a good asset solely because they went up in value.  If you're trying to argue that they're a good asset, you have to provide genuine reasoning for it.

The more people that have your attitude, the less people there are that would regard it as a good asset when the value decreases.