Just goes to show that ShapeShift are keeping logs of the addresses that are sending to their service and the addresses that they send to.

It's understandable, because the basis for their business is pretty strange anyway.  All proper altcoin exchanges require for you to register an account, and for larger amounts, to undergo verification.  The fact that they exchange to anonymous cryptocurrencies like Monero would make it extremely risky for them not to take logs.

It's possible that WannaCry will use a variety of different techniques to mix their coins, including maybe a mixer or two.

It's shocking that you're a Legendary member and yet don't understand that this is impossible.  Developers are not capable of increasing the maximum supply.

If they did so they would break the consensus rules and there would be a chain split (imagine Bitcoin Cash for example).  Because there is no reason for users to want a coin with a much higher supply, the market cap would fall and people would use the old chain.  Even if the majority of users moved to the new chain, you would have the option to use the original BTC with a 21 million max supply.
Not as a currency though, at least not in the modern day, hence why banks used to hold gold reserves and issue shitloads of money (which eventually became non-existent debt money, showing that gold is only a good store of value when held by individuals, much like BTC).

No.  Currently I want the price to crash because it's completely stupid and it makes no sense.
Any major price differences get arbitrage traded to death.  It's always possible that an exchange manipulating their own markets is going to affect other markets too.

I honestly pity anyone who is not taking profit right now.  Do you think that the price just jumps up by hundreds of dollars in a matter of hours naturally?  Of course not, it's going to come down as soon as whales think they can pick up the most cheap coins.

No.  There is no point making conspiracy theories because it has not happened.  Satoshi holds 50 coins in many addresses (one for each block he mined).

You can see what coins he most likely owned from his mining pattern.

Unless he sneakily mined some extra coins here and there, he has not moved nor sold his coins.

For anyone with a more significant amount of money, it will not be about which side they support.  It will be about which side they think will have a higher price.  Unfortunately people often seem to confuse these two things.

I don't particularly support Bitcoin Cash, but that doesn't mean I'm going to sell it.  The same applies the other way around.  So similarly I'll be holding both chains and watching how it ends, if it does at all.
That's because most people who loudly proclaim their opinion on Bitcointalk and Reddit are completely unwilling to listen or compromise in the slightest, regardless of anything that actually happens.

Most people on r/btc were opposed to SegWitx2 because it's not going far enough their way, and most people on r/Bitcoin were opposed to it because they don't want to raise the base block size at all.

So sometimes there has to be a middle ground that people won't be so outraged about that they'll ignore it when merchants start taking it.  I think SegWitx2 is fine for that purpose.

Export your private keys (or seed/backup phrase) into an "Electron Cash" wallet or a full node which supports Bitcoin Cash such as Bitcoin ABC.  You can check that you have the correct links from the official Bitcoin Cash page, bitcoincash.org.

You should then be able to send to an exchange such as bittrex.com from that wallet.

NOTE: please check exactly what I am saying by reading the Electrum guide to claiming and theymos' guide.

It is recommended that you use a separate computer for Electron Cash because the binaries are signed by anonymous developers.

If your backup phrase/seed is from a TREZOR or Ledger hardware wallet, you should be able to spend directly from your wallet.

Sorry for your loss.

So you don't think that Russian authorities mining is as bad as Chinese miners potentially being under the authorities' influence?

EDIT: though to be fair, ties to Putin here seem to be tentative at best.
So I suppose the market is going to give up for your sake then?  The only way that it can be changed is if BTC's PoW system changes, and for that to happen there needs to be a worthy change to make.  Sure, it's a shame that BTC is disproportionately wasteful, but it's not like people are going to give up on profits to make it efficient.

It is about that.  The control doesn't change at all.  All that changes is who wrote the code that the majority of users are deciding to run.  No one had control at any point.

If Jeff Garzik's code was what people were running, he would not have taken control.  He just proposes code and people decide whether to adopt it.  If Core then develops code that people decide to adopt again, there would be absolutely no shift of power, because Core had the exact same power that they had before - to develop code and hope that people run it.

If I understand correctly, he's implying that by leaving the earlier chain they are making it more profitable to mine on the earlier chain and that someone else would fill the gap.  Once that happens, moving back would be an economic burden on the miners.
I don't know and it's very annoying.  Also, if the price rose on Bitcoin Cash, non-Chinese miners would start mining on that chain as well.  So not only is Chinese miners being on the Bitcoin Cash chain not a problem, it wouldn't actually happen.
We're finding that out right now.  You can check what Bitcoin Cash's mining profitability has been doing relative to Bitcoin here.

The $48,000 in dust payments were not that much at the time.  You could equally argue that if you bought $1,000 of drugs from a dark market when the price was $1, they owe you millions.

PS:  Antpool takes transaction fees.  Looking at this chart, you can see that with Antpool's hashrate they make shitloads of money.

You've got a few of these mixed up.  Bullish and bearish are adjectives, so they're referring to people's attitude.  The people themselves are the bulls and bears.  So swap around bullish and bearish with bull and bear.

Also, a pump is a dramatic increase in price while a dump is a dramatic decrease in price.  Normal fluctuations are not pumps or dumps.

Fixed version:

Bitcoin's price both increases and decreases depending on the time, and to the individual it depends when they bought it. 

If the volatility was steadily going up, no one would ever spend it at all and it would be just about the worst currency ever.

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The gold price was once stable, because a government would agree to exchange gold for a fixed amount of fiat money.  Thus inflation happened as governments accumulated more gold.

Now, the gold price is not stable because its price is mostly based on speculation and not real-world use.

A similar thing applies to Bitcoin.  The problem is that Bitcoin users love to rebel against governments, but to make BTC a steady means of payment, it would need to already have taken over pretty much all payments in the world.

Alright, I'm getting bearish now.

Let's all remind ourselves of the price on January 1st: about $970.  So the price has multiplied by about 3.5 since the start of the year, and $1000 was pretty much the ATH before.

I know there's SegWit and everything but this price is ridiculous.  I've been buying a lot of stuff with it now.  It's not like some casual investors on the sidelines are shoving up the price by hundreds of dollars in a matter of hours.

The wallet providers just have an interface for paying a fee to the miners.  All good wallets let you choose your transaction fees, so you don't do a comparison of what the wallet providers set by default (if they have a default), you do a comparison of how long a transaction is likely to take to confirm with different fees.

As for SegWit, it would increase the transaction capacity.  How much this decreases the fees by depends on two factors:

-How many people are using the network and how close it is to full
-How many people upgrade to newer SegWit clients and use SegWit transactions

Personally I think that SegWit will drastically reduce the fees because the transactions being sent will not be near the network's max capacity and the fee market will subside.  However as more transactions are sent this might change back.

It's cool OP, you've realised your mistake and that you were naive to give away your recovery phrase.

In future, you'd be best off checking:

-Bitcoin.org (they warned against scams related to BCH as well)
-The posts of theymos on this forum, if he's made any
-Mainstream news sites such as Coindesk
-Your wallet's suggestions

Ideally check several sources to make sure that the information has not been altered.

Anyway, if that was all your coins, that's so shit.  I hope you've got a few coins left.  It's also a shame that people will be patronising you with pages and pages of pointlessly added posts saying that they "don't think it's a good idea" to share your private keys, but I guess they keep this thread nice and visible.

Yep.  I agree with that.
For the Bitcoin Core client, I agree.
So by introducing modified Bitcoin software and hoping that people adopt it, are people "taking over" or "attacking" Bitcoin?  Or are they attempting to gain consensus for what they believe is right?
Currently, it's no one.  If anyone wanted to alter a rule, they would need consensus.  Core is not above anyone else in that regard.

Now that is how to shitpost.  Well done, sir.

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Not all supporters of BU/EC have gone off to mine Bitcoin Cash.  BITMAIN's stance on Bitcoin Cash, for example, is unclear, and they are a particularly large supporter of Bitcoin Unlimited.  For now, BITMAIN are not directing their pools' hashrate at Bitcoin Cash.

However, I would argue that consensus is now favouring at least the SegWit part of the New York Agreement (and we'll find out about the hard fork later).

The important thing is that you can signal for SegWit and still signal for Bitcoin Unlimited.  All of the supporters of Bitcoin Unlimited are now signalling for SegWit because of BIP 91 (and before that, most of them had been signalling SegWit).

"UASF coin" does not exist, because UASF did not cause a chain split.  Come to think of it, since BIP 91 will soon achieve UASF's objective (to activate SegWit), you could argue that the main chain is the UASF coin.

As for PoW changes, that would just be a hard fork like BCH, and though we don't know how popular it would be, we know that we could just choose to use the old chain if necessary.

Luke does seem to be a tad mental in that he was OK with UASF potentially causing a chain split (the only reason it didn't is the miners being promised a 2MB hard fork), but he is opposed to basically any other chain splits on the grounds of consensus.  He seems to assume that consensus is following whatever his view is at the time.

For Bitcoin Core.  Bitcoin Core do not control the source code for Bitcoin itself.  You still haven't grasped that.
The point that you made to justify your opinion that SegWitx2 is bad was:
That was your argument.  That SegWitx2 is bad because it is trying to "take control of Bitcoin's source code and development".

DooMAD responded that your argument was based on a "flawed premise".  The flawed premise being that you think developing something which is not Bitcoin Core is an attempt to take over Bitcoin Core.

SegWitx2 would only be taking over Bitcoin Core if they literally went and murdered people from Bitcoin Core and edited the source code.  And even if they did that, they would NOT be "taking over Bitcoin", they would be "taking over Bitcoin Core".

Your argument is so detached from reality that it's painful, and in response to a rebuttal you have to claim that we are saying nothing.  In reality, we are telling you how consensus works, something which you should have learned about years ago but apparently didn't.

Core controls the source code for the reference client, which is conveniently titled "Bitcoin Core" so that you can get your head around what it is.  Anyone could contribute to Bitcoin Core's code as well.

If a second implementation of a full node were to become the reference client, or in fact if there were many different clients which all had a moderately high level of popularity, that would be a natural and acceptable part of consensus.

What you don't seem to understand is that Core's power would be the same if a different client were the reference client.  Core could still develop their own client and suggest that people use it.  However, it is always the users' choice to decide which is the best and most secure client.

The same applies to Core's proposals such as SegWit - Core cannot force a consensus, because there is only consensus if people actually agree.

The same applies to chain splits - Core cannot force people to use the earlier BTC chain.  This is because they do not have control over people's decisions.

The consensus model has never meant "Core says something, because Core are the masters of the world we must obey, all hail Bitcoin Core forever, any other dev teams are evil entities trying to take over Bitcoin".

You can slip in a lot of fancy words and discuss "semantics" all you like, but Bitcoin's consensus model isn't going to change for you.