Going into debt to take part in a risky investment is never a good idea.

Sure, traditional investments aren't sustainable forever, but the most that the Dow Jones Industrial Average has ever dropped in a day was 22.61% and that has only ever happened once.  

You can always say "Bitcoin will recover" and you'll most likely be right, but Bitcoin is not mature enough for you to enter it knowing that you have obligations to pay back the money eventually.  If the price fell to about a fifth of its value like it did from 2013-2015, you would be completely fucked and incapable of paying it back.  That's extremely likely to happen as well considering that the price has risen several times higher than it was a year ago.

So no, not a good idea.

I'm not sure what sites you're talking about, but all the major exchanges use normal prices.

You can see all the exchange rates relative to altcoins and fiat on https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/#markets.

If you're trying to buy with a credit card or PayPal, you'll be given crazy fees because they're reversible payment systems and the service could get scammed.

Oh yeah, you're the guy who claimed that directory.io lets people steal your coins.  So you start some FUD threads every now and then about perfectly normal activity.  Perhaps you just don't understand how probability works.

It's pretty decent trolling though, so fair play to you.
Quote from cash.coin.dance:

-Don't click on shortened links (such as goo.gl links) unless you definitely trust the sender.

-Download a decent antivirus.  Personally I use AVG plus Malwarebytes for extra scans.

-Try and protect your privacy when sending crypto if you have large amounts.  You don't want people to target you.

-Use long and strong passwords which are completely different for each service.  Ideally you could store them offline.  Personally I think paper in multiple locations is best.

-When you download anything from a website, be very careful to make sure that it's the correct domain.  There are a lot of phishing domains in crypto.  Also, some crypto products will have a signed message to verify that the binaries are legitimate - use that.

The main two factors are SegWit activation and greed.

SegWit activation is bullish because it results in an increase of network capacity.  Also, while the Lightning Network wouldn't be used by everyone, it would certainly be appealing to edgy types who feel super cool because they're using BTC.  In reality, that's who BTC is going to appeal to here.

However, greed accounts for the speed and magnitude of the rise.  SegWit's increase of onchain capacity isn't going to be as much as the price has risen since the start of the year, and all these new prices were on top of a price which was already quite high.

Your logic relies on the public losing faith in cryptocurrencies just because a government has over 51% of hashrate.

However, having 51% of hashrate certainly does not mean you can destroy the network.  An attacker can only reverse their own transactions or prevent new transactions from being confirmed.  All of people's transactions with a reasonable number of confirmations would be perfectly fine.

If a government wanted to break consensus rules, they couldn't do that either.  They'd have to fork off while the ordinary BTC users stayed on the minority chain.
I agree.  That would pretty much destroy clearnet use and the darknet wouldn't even have much faith after the price drop.

There are altcoin exchanges and there are fiat exchanges.  It's not like every exchange that deals with fiat is suddenly going to say "actually, everyone should be in crypto already so fiat doesn't matter anymore".

So the exchanges are going to stay doing pretty much what they are already because they're matching demand in the market.  If regulations get tighter, well, they can regulate their exchanges better.  Bitstamp is already pretty crazy with their KYC I hear.

I'm not sure about your logic here.  Bittrex is already practically preventing unverified accounts from withdrawing at all.

It's absurd to claim that exchanging between cryptos could not be illegal.  The WannaCry hackers were believed to try and go through ShapeShift.  Sooner or later there will be some government action on that.  Personally I say deal with it.

ViaBTC has a secondary paid service which is mentioned in the FAQ of their ordinary accelerator.  It's for unusual transactions that they will not accelerate for free.

It costs 0.01 BTC per kilobyte and you can contact them at their support email, support@viabtc.com.

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Seriously, what kind of Bitcoin transaction accelerator would only accept fiat?

If you're looking for a software wallet, I'm not sure why you have a thread in the "Web Wallets" section.

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The current Bitcoin Cash wallets don't appear to be the most stable things in existence, since they're in early development.

If you want an SPV wallet Electron Cash is the main one, but the binaries are signed with a pseudonym rather than real people.  If you want a full node you could use Bitcoin ABC.

Some earlier full-node implementations that have been around for longer also support Bitcoin Cash, notably Bitcoin XT, Bitcoin Classic and Bitcoin Unlimited.  You could try these as full nodes as well.

Ideally you would spread your coins between a couple of different wallets.  I don't fully trust any of them really, but full nodes tend to be the best choice so that you can be sure that your wallet is following the consensus rules.

Actually, they're not the same.

Fiat currency is not only based on what people are paying for it.  It's also based on the supply of it at the time.  The difference between BTC and fiat is that the BTC supply only rises by a fixed amount which decreases regularly, but the fiat supply rises exponentially based on how much debt people are in to the countries' banks.

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Seeing articles on the BBC and other mainstream news sites, you can see the comments claiming that people could just create more at any time.  There are actually several people who believe that and ignore that the entire purpose of the blockchain is to prevent that from happening.

That's because PayPal doesn't offer BTC's security.  They can screw around with your funds if they want to.  It's security versus convenience, and I don't think you can put an exact value on either of those things.
You are incorrect about that.  Actually, miners support it dramatically more than the economy, which is why it's 62% more profitable to mine on the original chain.

As for merchants, you're correct that the attitude towards BCH has been focused on exchanges and wallets rather than places to actually use it.  However merchants come with time.  If you were judging currencies based on where people accept it, you would be using fiat.
The fee that the exchange charged was quite reasonable.  It was a relatively large transaction of >600 bytes.

Trying to track coins that have gone through mixing services is classic police work.  If you go through a "classic" Bitcoin mixer like the defunct Bitmixer, you would deposit coins and they would pay you different coins that were deposited to them earlier.

Authorities would have to try and deduce some addresses which belong to the mixing service, and separate the different coins being mixed by amount (0.112 BTC is deposited to Bitmixer, the same amount minus fees comes out to a different address).  Blockchain analysis tools aren't too bad at stuff like this.

It's equally difficult to track large amounts to small amounts, it's only about how well the owner of those coins has protected their privacy.

In the case of Chipmixer, you receive entirely new wallets (Electrum wallets) instead of just new coins, and the wallets have fixed amounts of funds already inside of them which are different amounts to the amount you deposited.  Many mixing services try a variety of methods to get rid of the blockchain link to your coins.

It's obviously bullshit.  It's extremely unlikely that we're talking about more than a few million in total.  I hate when people overestimate the popularity of something they're doing, just because they're on a forum where people come to discuss it.  Most other places, people are only vaguely aware of the concept and even some people who currently own cryptocurrency are unaware of the banking system's current state (and are in it for more fiat).
BTC has had repeated bubbles.  There's the most faith in it right at the top of the bubble and the least right after it.  The ideal period is that part in between when a bull market is just beginning, like early 2016.  That's when merchants actually start accepting it as a decent payment system.  Most merchants don't care about stupid rises in price, you just hear about the few that do care as soon as the price leaps.

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What people can't get through their head is that there won't just be a sudden point at which the general public decide "alright, Bitcoin's pretty cool, let's get using it".  BTC will always be divisive, and there will only be a very gradual shift towards usage.  

This rise in price is NOT a "paradigm shift", it's only a "price shift".  Merchant usage is not getting much higher now than it was a few months ago, if at all.

Even though I'm expecting a crash in the BTC price, "investing" in that ICO is the most stupid idea you could ever have.

They're exactly like every other ICO this year - one completely mediocre idea that they stretch out into a giant whitepaper, and then promise to end world poverty with.  In this case they're promising that unemployed people all over the world will no longer have to worry about money again, because they can "earn billions" from home by playing a stupid Ethereum-based game.

You would be better off holding a rock than that shit.  At least BTC has some purpose.

Now please lock this thread and figure out what a "brain" is.

PayPal's fees in the US are 2.9% plus a static $0.25 fee.

$390 x 0.029 + $0.25 = $11.56, which would be the fee PayPal charges you if you're paying for goods and services.  So it's more than BTC.

In the UK they're even higher - 3.4% + £0.2.  390 dollars is about 300 pounds, so it would be 10.4 pounds, or 13.45 dollars.

BTC's fees are completely off the rails due to the bubble that we're in, but for significant transfers they're still lower than PayPal.  Regardless, SegWit will be activated in 1450 blocks and after a while we'll start moving our coins to SegWit-enabled wallets.

In 2009 when he received some worthless tokens in extremely early development (as a simple test), he could easily have lost access to his wallet.  It's not particularly unlikely.
Hang on a second, so this is what you're doing:

-Insulting people for believing Mike when he said he has no coins left
-Believing Mike when he said he has no coins left

Economic crises come pretty much every ten years in modern society.  The main question is how severe the next one will be.

It'll be the first economic crisis that BTC has lived through.  It existed in the later part of the last crisis, but it was not yet relevant enough for people to care about it.  So this time will be when we can see how BTC actually reacts to a crisis.

Personally I think BTC will pretty much ignore the crisis and act as it would anyway.  If BTC is already in a bubble when it happens (like it is now), it'll probably just act as false justification for the high prices before a crash.

You'd have to clarify exactly what the risks involved are before the user decides to use it.  The problem that you have to get past is that if the user sees an inconvenient version and a convenient version, why wouldn't they choose the convenient one?  It's just like Purse.io's slider of discount.  As you go for higher discounts it becomes more likely that the goods were bought from stolen credit cards, but the lay man doesn't think about this and just slides it as far as possible.

One incentive that you could have for them to use the main version is a static fee on "Chipmixer Lite" similar to Bitmixer.  Then they'd want to use the main version unless they couldn't handle using Electrum wallets at the time or they only needed the simpler privacy features of the Lite version instead of protection against governments and other powerful forces.

The only problem with that incentive is that it could mean that when using the main version, they might want to pay a lower donation than the fee for Chipmixer Lite.  The large users that understand your service properly might not have this problem, but smaller users could.

In any case you would have to be very careful about how you handle the coins for this service.

Moving your funds is secure, yes.  As long as the wallet you move them to is secure, it's safe to hold them there too.  A Ledger hardware wallet would be a reasonable choice.  

Actually, you don't have to use the Ledger hardware wallet's interface with it.  You can use Electrum with your hardware wallet too if you want, and just have the hardware wallet secure your keys.

Almost all mined cryptocurrencies except Bitcoin are mined with GPUs.  ASICs are starting to develop for Scrypt coins too, but still altcoins are mostly for GPUs.

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BTC provides an unparalleled security due to the vast amounts of money and computing power dedicated to securing the chain and the inability for 51% attacks to affect other users' coins.  Major altcoins are also extremely secure.

The more equipment gets bought, the more secure cryptocurrencies become, so I'm all for it.  But the sheer amount of economic value that would get wasted if they were used regularly really does raise questions about how viable they would be for mainstream use.