Regulated exchanges can be insured up to certain amounts, much like bank accounts.  As it says on GDAX:
It also comes down to moral competence of the exchange staff.  Ideally, regulated exchanges would be subject to forced auditing so that it's clear if a security breach or theft has taken place. 
It can give the two advantages that I just mentioned.  There's also the fact that whether we like it or not, governments are not going to allow unregulated exchanges to stay around forever, particularly the US government.  Eventually they'll be accused of aiding a crime such as money laundering (this happened to BTC-e).  That's why Bitfinex has had to be careful dealing with US customers.

Unregulated exchanges are important for people who find their privacy important.  But for some people and for the biggest traders, regulated exchanges can be a better way to go.

If the "wallet" is able to deduce which sites you're sending to and that information is available to them, they wouldn't have much choice but to suspend accounts that are involved in shady legal activity.  The BTC casinos (that I'm aware of) are unregulated entities which are illegal in the US and many other states.  

You could use Xapo or Kraken, but they won't work forever because if the information of what you're doing becomes readily available to them and the government comes knocking, they can't do much else.

You can either move your coins to a wallet where you control your private keys, or only buy small amounts at a time and send all your coins to the casino at once.  Other choices are not particularly safe.

BitPay, Coinbase and other payment processors are very important.  However, it's difficult to underestimate how speculative the current market is.

As it is, a lot of transactions are still going to be between exchanges and wallets or between individuals for smaller reasons.  There's a fine balance of power between whales, miners, merchants, payment processors (representing merchants), mining pools (representing miners), nodes, media and ordinary users.

However, none of them can make an accurate judgement about what the other groups are going to do, and all of them are subject to bias.

Every two weeks, the difficulty adjusts to try and make a block (on average) every ten minutes.  So if, during a two-week period, many more miners started mining on a chain, we can expect faster blocks until the next difficulty period.

It might be the case that the BTC price (or BCH price) keeps rising and mining gear keeps getting better.  In that scenario, the BTC or BCH blocks would typically be mined slightly faster than (on average) every ten minutes, because more miners would join during each period.  However, BCH being much more profitable than BTC now will of course not last, because more miners will join and then the slower blocks at the next difficulty adjustment will affect their profits.
It does still involve the difficulty adjusting to produce a block every ten minutes.  But if you read my post, you'll understand that it doesn't always have to take ten minutes to mine a block. 

BCH also has an emergency difficulty adjustment in case the blocks are too slow.  This is explained in their ANN thread.

You're basing your argument on the premise that if you had more money, you would be trading better.  The reality is that if you had more money, you would be very emotional because you're terrified of losing large amounts at once or suffering from volatility.  Even if you were not like this, you can't just trade and expect to succeed.  You need to have a clear strategy and actual reasoning behind what you're doing other than the fact that crypto has rose in value in the past.

People do make money from trading but no one makes a "reliable" or "steady" income from crypto trading unless they're a complete whale who has enough power to manipulate the market.

Your parents were wrong about crypto being drug money, and they should not have prevented you from accessing your bank account, but you need to be serious here.  You sound like an extremely cliche teen rebel.

Fiat is no longer backed by gold, nor does even gold have as much of an intrinsic value as what we now pay for it.

---

Gold mining and BTC are similar in that mining groups are incentivised to spend different amounts of resources on mining based on the price of the asset.  If a gold mining group estimates how much gold is in a specific area, they have to figure out whether they can make a profit with the resources they spend on mining it.  BTC is much the same.
Actually, BTC's estimated energy consumption is similar to that of Croatia and Tunisia. It covers several million people.
As you can see from the article I posted, that's arguably untrue.  And we're talking about total consumption here, even though Visa process hundreds of times more transactions than BTC on a daily basis.

cash.coin.dance:  "The original chain has grown 2.51GB more than the Bitcoin Cash blockchain".

You are saying that 8MB blocks are resulting in faster confirmations.  However, BTC transactions would be confirming in the next block with low fees if the BTC chain was handling the same amount of transactions as the BCH chain.  You are talking about the max block size, when what matters is the block size that's being used.

Furthermore, SegWitx2 having "8MB blocks" is not quite the same as a base block size increase.  As Jimmy Song explains on Medium:

Simple.  Go on coinmarketcap.com and multiply the amount of XRP you have by the AUD price that they show.  You could also go onto the "markets" section and check the trading pairs' prices that are directly against AUD.  If you want to figure out the value of the BTC you're getting, just do the same with the BTC price.
The price is not historically low, it's just come out of an absolutely monstrous pump.  A couple of years ago this would have been the top.  

I can't tell you whether it's a good time to buy but I can tell you to be extremely careful playing around with alts, or you could get burned.

Blockstream have raised millions before.  I doubt they're struggling for cash.

If they had a problem, they could always start some ICO with a bullshit token and a promise to "revolutionise" something or other.  I'm sure they'd raise tens of millions of dollars in a matter of seconds.

Looks like they're getting ahead of themselves though.  It would be better to make it possible for more poorer people to actually use BTC before trying to make it happen.  As it is, those people would shove the fees up out of control.

And to simultaneously solve almost every single major problem with crypto, but I guess that doesn't matter if you enjoy commenting on things you know nothing about.
Byteball's approach is to get through to as many different people as possible.  That means using the market which has already matured the most (Bitcoin) to try and distribute as well as easily possible.

The difference between BTC and Byteball here is that in BTC, it's the block reward for mining.  In Byteball there is no mining, and transactions are verified in a somewhat centralised manner using democratically elected "witnesses".  All bytes already exist, and the challenge is simply finding the best way to distribute them.  So there is no guarantee of exactly what will happen in all of the future rounds, but I consider it unlikely that there will be more coins to distribute in a year's time.

My thought is that no cryptocurrency has yet come close to mainstream adoption in stores, and it may take a long time before there is one appropriate for that to really happen.

So once there is some kind of genuine need for one specific cryptocurrency in order to pay, it can retain that power over regular payments and ignore the existing "tech race".  Then it will be a good safe haven for funds.

Until then, I perceive cryptocurrencies' market prices to just be the market's opinion on which cryptocurrencies are making the best developments towards being a good currency (or good use of blockchain technology).

Bitcoin is not part of this innovation race simply because there is a perceived value to the adoption that it already has.

The first thing to do is check the stickied thread for rules.

The second thing you should do is find a trusted escrow.  Also make sure to verify the escrow's signature and make sure that the escrow PMs both of you directly.

Other stuff is just correct boards to post in and your own discretion on what prices to offer.  Should be common sense to most people.

You can see from Coinmarketcap's markets page that trading volume against JPY is much lower than the volume against dollars or Euros.  So it's something that we've made up.

There has been high South Korean trading volume, but still it hasn't "gone mainstream" or reached a point at which there is crazy enthusiasm in investment.

In my view, BTC has not gone mainstream yet, but there is no guarantee that a bubble actually involves people going mainstream.  None of the other BTC bubbles so far have reached that point.  Compared to the past, we're already deep into the "mania" phase of a bubble and I've seen some unironic "new paradigm" comments in the Wall Observer thread.  It's hard to tell how much further this will go though.

We don't know.  It's just an estimate based on this blog post.

The writer observed a mining pattern which looked like most of the blocks in it were mined by the same entity - an entity which began mining at block 1 and restarted at regular intervals (probably to back up wallets).

We do not know whether he has sold any coins at all but the majority of coins mined in that period have not moved and no blocks that we expect to be satoshi's coins have moved.

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.