OK, but the liquidity is easily enough to sell a million dollars or so all at once while barely affecting the market at all.  So it's not like 2-4% would become a normal gap when dealing with much smaller amounts of money than that.
In BTC most exchanges take 0.25% at most.  More than that and they wouldn't be competitive.  Coinbase charges 1.5% but they remove the spread altogether and they still have their dedicated exchange, GDAX.  

In traditional markets, the fees vary but I don't think I've seen fees that high before.

It's nice, but all the existing portfolio trackers that people use are already a lot more developed and a lot more professional.

You would need stuff like reports on the taxes you would have to pay depending on your state; support for practically all coins on Coinmarketcap and a search function; charts of your portfolio's progress for as long as you've had it, and probably quite a few other things, as well as providing a nice user experience.

Ideally you need to give some kind of reassurance about the privacy of users' funds as well, or people with large amounts probably wouldn't tell the site about them.

If you're just starting out and trying to learn about web design, I can appreciate the basic functions of the site at least.

Personally I have a TREZOR which I think is excellent.  It costs $100 but you don't just have to use it as a BTC wallet - you can use it for 2FA and as a password manager too.

Unfortunately I can't think of any hardware wallets that are particularly cheap.  There used to be a Ledger wallet which cost 30 Euros or something, but they don't have it anymore and I would personally avoid getting second hand hardware wallets.

The Ledger Nano S is interesting too, but it costs €69 and is currently out of stock until September.  So you would have to be prepared to wait.

Do not do this.  Ponzi schemes are only profitable to their owners for as long as people continue to deposit money into them.  A completely obvious Ponzi scam should not still be getting enough investments to keep running several months down the line.

---

Most people on this thread claim to understand that it's a Ponzi scheme, but you do not understand why.  Here are the signs:

-Bitconnect's coin can only be bought on their own exchange from your Bitconnect account, plus a couple of small shady exchanges.
-Bitconnect is promising you an increase in cash value for a cryptocurrency.  A cryptocurrency is its own unit and the only thing which Bitconnect could actually promise you is an increase in the amount of Bitconnect coins that you own.
-Issues with "pending support requests"
-Running for a long time without any details of their investment activity
-Their domain is registered with NAMECHEAP, one of the only domain registrars to accept BTC as a payment method, and their whois information is anonymous.  They have no regulated company.

It's possible that the attacker sent your coins directly to a third party like a mixer or an exchange, in which case a variety of things could have happened to it.  It's also possible that the attacker is HODLing or that they're afraid to move the coins and be subject to blockchain analysis. 
It seems unlikely.  Shitloads of brain wallets have had the funds stolen from them.  Besides, BTC is an ideal asset to steal so if you're a criminal with a computer, brainwallets might be the first place you go.

As for getting it back, you'll only get it back if someone finds out who the thief is.  It seems unlikely that that'll happen, since police forces are too busy arresting people for buying a few drugs on the darknet.

As far as I know, satoshi did not mention offchain transactions at all because he did not consider it likely that the network would reach its current block size limits.  He certainly didn't say "offchain transactions should be just for micropayments" because BTC itself is supposed to be for micropayments.

Regardless of what satoshi said, offchain transactions will be great for payments of <$100 and payments which require extreme security IMO.  The Lightning Network is a good middle ground between BTC and fiat - it brings convenience, and you can still have the blockchain's eternal security whenever you want.
Yep, it's too early to tell how those things will work out.  How I'm looking at it'll be moderately centralised, but that's sort of fine considering that no one in an LN transaction actually has access to the funds except the people sending and receiving it.

There's no magical time at which Bitcoin suddenly becomes "mainstream" and then people have to work with what's in front of them.

The reality is that BTC adoption will be a slow process which will happen based on both the security and the convenience on both chains.  It's most likely that there will be several different solutions implemented in an attempt to increase capacity without only increasing the block size. 

In the future when the blocks are full again, I don't know what will happen, but that's because the solutions are already going to be worked on.  If it desperately requires a block size increase, that'll probably happen.

Bullshit.  The liquidity is about 3 billion dollars in a 24 hour timeframe right now.
There's your problem.  Blockchain.info is not an exchange.

Did you see the link I posted?  It shows all of the major trading pairs with Bitcoin.  If you scroll down, you will see that the fiat trading pairs have pretty much the same price as the market price.  Blockchain.info is not an exchange, they just partner with the service Coinify.  Coinify is also not an exchange in the conventional sense, they just allow spending with credit cards and have crazy fees (and incorrect exchange rates) in order to protect against the huge risk of chargeback fraud and to earn significant profits.

Now I am oversimplifying this a tad because there is a slight gap between buy and sell prices on the conventional exchanges, called a "spread".  However, it's not that significant and it happens naturally because of market forces and any other market (like gold for example) would be the same.

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.