It happens.  Actually, the fee estimating site is showing that even zero-fee transactions are being confirmed (whether that'll last I don't know).

AGD should try sending a zero-fee transaction just for the sake of saying that 0 satoshi/byte is ridiculously low.

That said, it's not like most consumers are willing to send to a merchant online and wait twelve hours before their transaction confirms.

Originally, you could transfer large amounts of BTC with no fees.  Just like this transaction, which transferred 194,993 BTC (now worth almost a billion dollars) for free.  Even then, including your fee would have given miners an incentive to include your transaction first, but your transaction would still have been included in a block.

But if transactions were free forever, you could imagine that there would be spam on the network.  An attacker could send an unlimited number of free transactions and fill the block space to such an extent that it's a terrible burden on full nodes and people no longer run the blockchain.

So satoshi made a limit to the size of blocks as a device against spam.  That means that an attacker can only send a certain amount of transactions before he fills the blocks, and then the attacker (as well as ordinary users, unfortunately) has to pay fees to include each transaction in a block until it becomes far too expensive to spam and they give up.

There are suggestions of raising this limit because arguably the blocks are becoming full by ordinary means, but some disagree with raising it.

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Still, the transaction fees are not as high as you think.  Your wallet is suggesting too high a fee, and a decent wallet will let you change it.

F2Pool simultaneously support everything that you could think of and absolutely nothing.

They were originally against SegWit and block size increases but later came to favour SegWit.  They joined in with the NYA but now are (probably) giving up on it.  With the amount that their position changes, I wouldn't even trust them not to support the hard fork in November.

Personally I think it'll be a total bloodbath in terms of price if there isn't a clearly leading chain by a month or so after the fork.  This isn't like Bitcoin Cash where there's a clear minority and clear majority.

Something you could do is getting someone who takes part in their affiliate program to give out their affiliate earnings to you.  

But considering the high payout threshold, low affiliate earnings and transaction fees/times, it seems like it's not worth trying.
Same for me.  Considering that the BTC price has multiplied by four since then though, it's easy to overstate the benefits of getting it early.

BTC gambling is already moderately popular.  One of the most popular BTC gambling sites was Satoshi Dice, which at some points took up absolutely massive amounts of transactions and was even considered an attack on the blockchain.

Due to the higher confirmation times though (or higher transaction fees, basically your choice) recently, it's become harder to gamble with small amounts of satoshi, which was one of the main benefits of BTC casinos.

There's also the fact that a lot of BTC gambling sites have started banning US customers and many of them are running shady businesses which have a questionable legal status.  Anonymity is tough because governments will typically require age verification.

So basically, it's a good idea but it hasn't worked out too well in practice yet.  Ideally some "ordinary" online casinos would start accepting it.

That would be:

-Ridiculously centralised
-Unsustainable
-Impossible for people to agree on

Basically you're suggesting conjuring money out of thin air and giving it to people.  You can't do that with BTC.
Bitpay already does this for a fee of 1% (far less than PayPal and credit cards), but why consider that when you can take everyone's money with a bullshit ICO?

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The closest thing to what you're talking about is Byteball's planned cashback program, but Byteball's supply already exists and there is no miners so it's very different.  With BTC it's impossible.

It could become worse as time goes on, but right now there's not much risk of those coins becoming less valuable because BTC-e users have the option to:

-Run their coins through a good mixer
-Convert to an anonymous coin like Monero and back

Even if they end up receiving dirty coins, they can just show their mixer's message that they received the coins from the mixer or attempt to prove that they received the coins from a Shapeshift address.

This could change as mixers and altcoin exchanges become subject to more complex KYC procedures and governments attempt to intervene very aggressively into the space, but for now it looks relatively safe.

It's not quite correct to say that BTC is deflationary.  Basically, the supply increases by a fixed amount every block.  That amount begun at 50 BTC per block (a block being mined approximately every ten minutes), and the amount halves every 210,000 blocks (about four years).

Eventually (around 2140) the total supply will have been reached and then you could say Bitcoin is deflationary because there will be a small number of coins that are lost and become inaccessible, pushing down the supply just slightly.  But even while the supply is increasing, it's very different to the modern fiat's system concept of inflation which is for it to happen for as long as possible and pray that people keep taking out loans from banks.
Bitcoin brings financial sovereignty for digital money.  I agree that this may be a problem to the average consumer, but there's no way of fixing the problem without compromising that sovereignty.

People aren't stupid though - it's not like they could never consider the fees from credit cards and other modern payment systems.

You need to look at the site more carefully.  The site is recommending the fees that you should send to have the transaction almost certainly confirmed in the next block.

If you look on the right, you can see that it shows how long the transaction is expected to take to confirm with different fees.  When sending fees of 1-30 satoshi/byte, it says that it could take between 2 and 26 blocks to confirm (five minutes to six hours).

Wallets have been recommending very high fees recently because when the network was clogged a few months ago, there were problems with them paying too low fees.  Basically they're just being cautious, but it's perfectly fine to pay lower fees than they suggest.

IMO the best unit is "bits", or microbitcoin, because 1 bitcoin = 1 million bits.

In theory if BTC was adopted as a mainstream currency (which I personally see as unlikely), and the price was 1 million dollars, one bit would be worth one dollar and you could have two decimal places (satoshi in reality) per bit.

Bits would also be effective if the price stays roughly as it is, because one bit will be worth one US cent when the BTC price is 10,000 dollars (and right now it's worth about half of a cent).

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Even though most of us know that "one Bitcoin" is completely irrelevant, it is sort of a mental barrier for people.

It's pretty unlikely that someone will scam you when giving you Bitcoin in exchange for PayPal, provided that you wait until the coins are in LocalBitcoins escrow before sending.

It's far more likely that the person sending PayPal will scam, considering that PayPal is reversible.  That's why LocalBitcoins sellers only sell small amounts of BTC at a time for PayPal and they add extremely high premiums over the exchange rate.

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You'd be far better off withdrawing from PayPal to your bank account and spending that or spending cash - especially considering that PayPal doesn't actually allow you to trade with BTC - but if you really need to use PayPal, you could try using the e-coin debit card.  You can fund your account with PayPal and buy BTC from there.

If you want it to be simple though, you can just use LocalBitcoins and Paxful.

So the main goal is for the coins to be a massive BTC grab, but of course no one here sees a problem with that.
1 BTC is a completely arbitrary amount.  You should invest as much as is appropriate for you rather than working towards arbitrary targets.
It's quite unusual for a person to continue trading shitloads of alts, most of which don't actually achieve a lot, without losing money in the end.

You can delude yourself into thinking you're a good trader just because the price of basically everything is going up at the same time, but if you really don't have much money to lose, you'll be pretty badly hurt in the next bear market.  Just stay safe.

There used to be a graph here showing the percentage of SegWit transactions that were being sent.

I can't see it anymore, but last time I checked it was drastically less than 1% of all transactions.  I would say that it's not having much of an effect yet.
Utter bullshit.  The development is not currently controlled by anyone, and it will not be controlled by anyone then either.  Anyone can run whatever client they like at any time.

Seems like a "proper regulated" environment would involve banning mixers, having extremely deep KYC procedures in all exchanges including LocalBitcoins, and banning transfers into more anonymous coins like Monero.  Basically it would just remove all privacy that people ever had while using BTC.  Personally I don't think that's acceptable.
It should help citizens monitor wealth and honesty in the banking system.  For tax reporting it's not really as good as digital fiat money.
People will try their best to find a more anonymous system. Right now they have cash, without cash they would use BTC or an anonymous crypto, without BTC they would find something else or perhaps use a valuable item like gold.

It takes investment to buy decent machines for BTC mining.   If you're deep into poverty, you don't really have the choice to invest in thousands of dollars worth of mining gear.

Even if you did, you'd have to convert back into fiat (probably US dollars for relative stability) in order to buy everyday goods and pay your electricity bills.

I'm not saying that BTC can't be useful in countries with unstable fiat currency - it can - but not just as a device to ultimately make fiat money.  Once the situation in Venezuela is more stable, perhaps then people will start seeing inherent problems in the modern fiat currency system.

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.