Great to dream big, but I'm not sure I see anything which sets you apart from other coins.  A cool name isn't everything - Bitcoin is a great name already.  What's original enough about that coin to cause real usage?

Currently Bitcoin Core is consistently very dominant (the reference client) in terms of nodes.

What you do need to show is the number of blocks mined for each Bitcoin scaling standpoint (neutral/old Core, SegWit, Bitcoin Unlimited, Bitcoin Classic etc).  That's a lot more important than nodes as it's about what actually happens.

Not really.  A CEO is a leader of sorts - the whole point is that no one is a leader and everyone is a HODLer.  None of us have control over Bitcoin, we just all own a tiny permanent bit of it.

I don't think you can get a much better website than the official one bitcoin.org.  It gives reasonably simple explanations for what Bitcoin is and how to use it.  Sometimes it's good to just ignore all the comments about drugs and illegal activity and just explain simply what it is like the website does.  People usually understand.

Let's clear this up since the responses here seem a bit confusing.

With online wallets that you sign up to, you are not sending the transactions, they are.  Therefore they have control over what fees you pay, however all of the fees are going to the miners.

The fees which the online wallet will be paying for your transaction will either be the same as a normal transaction like blockchain.info, or in the case of some providers they will group together several transactions into one transaction (a batch transaction) to lower the amount of fees they have to pay overall due to lower transaction sizes in bytes.  If they offer it for free, they're probably doing this along with their own methods of earning profit from running the wallet so that they can cover your costs themselves.

Electrum is a "real" wallet.  That means that you are sending the transactions.  When you're doing it, you have responsibility over the fees you pay.  The fees which will result in a quick confirmation do not rely on the wallet - sending from a hardware wallet, a software wallet (like Electrum) or any other wallet which you actually own yourself will only rely on the size of the transaction.

The main thing that determines the size of the transaction is the number of inputs and outputs in the transaction.  If you accept 1 Bitcoin three times and then you send a 3 Bitcoin transaction, that 3 Bitcoin transaction will have 3 inputs.  The more inputs, the higher your fees will be.  Outputs are just what addresses you're sending to, so your fees would then be higher if you were doing a batch transaction as well.  There are other factors which are why batch transactions are cheaper, but these are the main factors that you can control.

That's part of the reason why faucets are a waste of time - if you accept too many payments, your fees will get nearly as high as your amount of Bitcoin.  The only way to remedy the insane fees are to use faucet caches which hold the Bitcoin until you have a high enough amount to withdraw, but it'll take a long time because faucets are still just paying dust anyway.

Litecoin has always been technologically superior to Bitcoin in that it has a higher transaction capacity and better mining algorithm.  It was just a natural development.  However, while I'm all in favour of diversifying and putting a bit into Litecoin as well, I don't think Litecoin is going to be so great that everyone flees to there away from Bitcoin.  Litecoin is still propped up by its higher block reward as well. 

Even if Bitcoin never gets SegWit it'll have value as an immutable asset.  It's just easier to transition into SegWit on Litecoin because there's still less money (and let's be honest, corruption and monopolisation) in Litecoin than Bitcoin, but this will change.

More important than that though is that trading isn't a get rich quick scheme.

Cryptocurrency trading can be the most profitable form of investment, just like penny stocks.  The price goes way up and way down all the time, often even with pump and dumps and people can be drawn in by that thinking that they can get in on it too.

But the reality is that the giant swings aren't things that everyone profits from.  The experienced people profit from it, and the way that they do it is by exploiting the newbies and weak hands so that they can get more out of it, especially with things that have a low enough trading volume like cryptocurrencies.

Pretty sure BTC-E are still processing withdrawals.  However, they have been very slow at times.  They're just not accepting fiat deposits, which is not nearly as extreme as blocking deposits because people can still trade Bitcoin and fiat properly.  That's why there hasn't been as much coverage as Bitfinex, who also have had more issues recently that could cause problems (like the hack and how weird this BFX token thing is).  I just remember seeing that information on the forum, I haven't actually found any articles about it.

Spammers don't matter that much.  Micropayments were always going to be impractical in this PoW system.

Satoshi doesn't have to be right about everything.  He produced something great, that's all we need to know - after that, what matters is what happens to it, not what he believed would happen to it.

The point is that Bitcoin gives people responsibility for their finances while banks take that responsibility.  Therefore, banks can give the option of paying microtransactions while Bitcoin can't - banks can offer fees as a percentage rather than an amount.  Since Bitcoin's fees don't increase very much with an increased amount of Bitcoin being sent, it means that what you pay is low for large amounts and will always be high for low amounts.

Antminer is indeed the main series.  BITMAIN is pretty evil but the machines are fairly efficient.

If you have free electricity or some sort of unchanging cost, then Avalon might be a good company for you (I think the Avalon 721 is their most popular miner).  They have pretty low costs for machines relative to hashrate but the energy efficiency is very low.

If your electricity costs are normal, then Antminers are your main choice - the S9 and T9 are big ones right now.

In this practical application of a hard fork it would.

I wouldn't really call it an "altcoin" but it's basically a different coin, in the same way that ETC and ETH are separate coins.  It was my understanding that in a hard fork without a very, very high consensus (which Bitcoin won't achieve, it's most likely that BU will have less than 80% miner support and possibly only slightly over 50%), a split would occur and that would cause uncertainty.

If you can explain to me in reasonable terms why that wouldn't be the case, I'm definitely listening.  But from anything that I know so far I don't see it happening, especially when hard forks aren't backwards compatible.

It's because YoBit is extremely unreliable.  No one can guarantee that they'll get their money out - same reason why people aren't trying to even out the price on Bitfinex with the huge premium.

It was postponed several times before being rejected.

There are plenty of desperate attempts by various groups to get a Bitcoin ETF approved, but it's not going to happen.  The American government is definitely opposed to it, because of their beliefs about fraud being committed with Bitcoin and their thoughts that it should be treated like a penny stock (they don't see any intrinsic value).

The SEC will naturally be conservative about ETFs for very different technology like Bitcoin.

Really it's economic turmoil that can be bullish for Bitcoin.  People put their money in whatever makes them feel the most secure.  Unfortunately that's not really Bitcoin yet due to all of the volatility, but it'll be bullish for gold and in the long term would probably help Bitcoin.

Not that I actually want there to be economic turmoil, but it can help Bitcoin grow and become more stable.

Any exchange which has restricted functionality dealing with any of the currencies they're supposed to trade should be removed from price estimations.  It's worthless if the traders' beliefs about the exchange are affecting the price, so that even applies to OKCoin while the price is lower than the rest.  Since so many exchanges are messed up right now there won't be a lot of exchanges to be included other than Bitstamp and Coinbase.

Sorry for that.  Looks like some people weren't reading the thread.

When you receive Bitcoin to your address, sending will effectively be from that address.

So if I receive 0.01 Bitcoin from three different people and then I send 0.03 Bitcoin to someone else, it will be sent from the three different addresses that I received from, at the same time.  Therefore, the closest that a person could really get to finding what that transaction was is that any of the people who sent you 0.01 Bitcoin can see that you sent 0.03 Bitcoin (they can't see what it was for or any information about it though).

If you are sending less than your total balance, then the Blockchain wallet will automatically send with as few inputs (transactions you received/addresses) as possible which makes the size of your transaction smaller thus reducing fees.  With "real" wallets which aren't online, like Electrum for example, you can choose what addresses to send from.

Well Bitcoin is kind of supposed to be immutable to protect its security.  So all development has to be high consensus, which is nearly impossible when the community is large and divided like it is.

So altcoins are what step in to serve different purposes.  Litecoin is one of the best of those because they've shown that they're good at protecting principles of Bitcoin while developing it to something more practical.

Unfortunately, loads of these altcoins are immutable as well.  So the reason that altcoins never get far enough is because every time a new development comes, there has to be a new altcoin, and eventually people give up on these extra features and just fall back to Bitcoin again.

Spot on.  YoBit is crap at handling their funds and a huge amount of the coins that are traded on there are imaginary.  It removes the ability to do decent cryptocurrency arbitrage trading between exchanges or anything actually clever with the coins.

They're not a scam though really, they just enjoy listing whatever scams they can find.  You could call it capitalism.

Iamnotback isn't a shill.  The only reason I say this is because his opinion on anything changes about a hundred times a week so if he was actually getting paid, he would have to be paid by about a thousand services per day.

He's just 24/7 posting detailed technical reasons for each side of anything, and often I actually find them pretty interesting, albeit sometimes excessive or arrogant.

Sure, it's not that large when it's just one and you're downloading it as a slight addition to what it was before.

But when you're talking about downloading hundreds of gigabytes of data each year and needing to keep your node running nearly all of the time to keep up and having to have great bandwidth to handle it, that's when nodes become less accessible.

Block size increase is great for a temporary increase in transaction capacity.  But when you're talking about long-term upgrades to the protocol before Bitcoin can become even more immutable because it's sufficiently scalable, you have to consider that you can't just keep shoving up the block size.  You have to find ways to upgrade the protocol and actual system properly, otherwise you'll end up with the scenario of a few mining monopolies running full nodes and no one else.