It wasn't really directed at you.  It was more to do with the fact that hundreds of millions of dollars are being stored in exchanges with very poor regulations that could be extremely irresponsible with people's money.

Personally, I try my best to look at topics on this forum, Reddit, Steemit and anywhere I can to find out whether an exchange is trustworthy before I consider joining it.  Even if they are not particularly trustworthy (no altcoin exchange that I can think of really is), there are plenty of exchanges that are functional and process withdrawals properly now.  In my case, I decided that Bittrex was the altcoin exchange I should use if I want to get withdrawals out, and fortunately I was right.

As for trading P2P, unfortunately the margins can be quite high.  I tend to avoid it too.

Really?  Because you can send transactions with fees of about 20,000 satoshi and get confirmation pretty easily.  At most you're talking about 0.5% on a transaction of $100, with the median transaction size.

PayPal charges fees of about 3%, with static fees of 25 cents in the US and 20p in the UK, with only slightly better convenience.  Are those fees too high for your liking?
SegWit will most likely lock in this difficulty period and activate the next.  The problem won't be 100% solved forever, but it'll get better.  That sort of transaction could also move to LN for convenience if necessary.
I doubt the fee would still be 20k satoshi at that point.  The fee market is based on what users are willing to pay.

BITMAIN support the idea of a low-consensus hard fork ("UAHF"), but they do not fully support Bitcoin Cash and they're keeping all of their hash rate on the Bitcoin main chain.

If BITMAIN were to bribe Kraken to support something which they don't support, they would have to bribe them more than the amount of BCC they could earn by stealing it from their users.

Yep.  Bitcoin transactions are instant, but when you have your coins in Coinbase, they are holding and spending them for you.  It's like a bank in that you put in money based on the promise that you can get it out again when you want. 

The vast majority of Bitcoin wallets give you control over your private keys, but a few online wallets don't (and no exchanges do, as far as I know).  You should check Bitcoin.org's guide to different types of wallets, if you ever need a more convenient way to send than your paper wallet.
SegWit's aim is to increase the capacity of the network so that you get quicker confirmations.  Sending itself is still instant.

True, but if you want to handle it in a professional or at least reasonable way, Blockchain.info is not the choice.  During the period of high fees, they didn't bother to adjust their fee system until when the fees were coming down again.  They're just incompetent with any kind of upgrade or bug fixes.

In general, everyone in this section should be warned about the services which are unlikely to handle this properly.  Blockchain.info have not been clear about how they intend to handle this fork.

Green Address is not a stereotypical online wallet.

They do not require full trust in the service, because your transaction has to be signed by both you and Green Address.  It's a multisignature online wallet.  They also have the ability to do 2-of-3 transactions in which you can sign a transactions from two of your devices when necessary, meaning that you have basically no trust in Green Address at all.

They are far from ideal, but it would be perfectly acceptable if for whatever reason you would find it difficult to run a software-based wallet.  You do have control over your funds.

It was about $60.  The price of ETC then was about $20.
I don't know about that.  Complaints about Poloniex failing with deposits and withdrawals are pretty common these days, and they removed the trollbox which makes them far less accountable for their actions.
I suspect that they're using people's coins for something else in the time that they avoid processing withdrawals.  No exchange is that incompetent for that long without having malicious intent.

It's shocking that people still hold their coins on BTC and altcoin exchanges after Mt. Gox, Cryptsy and now most likely BTC-E.

Well considering that they're hurting the entire life of an innocent child, I'd say that their beliefs can take a running jump.

If people's beliefs involve violence or incite violence, "respecting their beliefs" goes out of the window completely.  Your mentality is similar to the people who were saying you shouldn't punch Nazis.  Of course you should punch Nazis, because they're inciting violence against people of different races and religions and you need to keep people, the majority of whom are innocent, safe.

If these kids respect their parents' decision about who they should marry, that doesn't mean that they arranged marriages should exist.  It just means that they should consent to the marriage which their parents want them to have, once they are of a reasonable legal age to consent to it.

The block reward will be exactly the same on the 1st of August as it is now.  The block reward will not change until the next halving in 2020.

The split is to something completely separate (Bitcoin Cash), which has the same block reward as Bitcoin, but Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash are completely separate to each other and when you mine a block on one, you do not automatically mine a block on the other.

No it isn't.  Most of BCC's price will not be new money moving into cryptocurrency, it will be money moving out of BTC and into BCC.  A bonus for BTC holders would just be the price rising by 15%.

I consider it more likely that the BCC price will be extremely low after the split because a lot of Bitcoin holders will dump their coins and there won't be a lot of liquidity.  In the long term though, who knows what could happen.
It can't be being pumped.  It doesn't exist yet.
It can divide very easily.  Division over various issues, as well as unnecessary hype, is what has caused the rise of many altcoins as well.

As I just pointed out, BCC is not an attack on Bitcoin.  Anyone can create a fork of Bitcoin - if they were all attacks on Bitcoin, Bitcoin would have died long ago.

As for hijacking the brand, there is some merit in that argument - but I think that people are letting their opinion get in the way of a neutral judgement.  When the similar fork BitCore happened, people did not perceive it to be an attack on Bitcoin, but by this poor logic it would have been.

There is nothing that Bitcoin Cash could do to "take over" Bitcoin.  The two chains will act solely on market forces.  Even in the unlikely scenario that Bitcoin Cash ended up with a higher price, it would not have taken over at all.  As for hash rate, it will eventually move along with the price when there are two chains, sooner or later.
As long as the code is open source and anyone can contribute to the development team's code, it's fine for one team to develop the reference client.  There should definitely be competition and people should definitely recognise that other clients exist, but there are problems with having too many implementations at once.

Satoshi mentioned this as well:


What people need to know is that development teams do not have real power.  Development teams just develop, and Bitcoin users/miners/nodes decide what code to follow.  So different proposals do not need the support of Bitcoin Core.

It only depends on the country you live in.  In the UK:

-Capital gains tax is paid when converting to fiat
-VAT is paid when paying for goods and services (how well this is enforced is another matter)
-Mining and mining-related services are exempt from VAT.

You have to be careful about declaring it if you're dealing with large amounts.  The repercussions of not paying tax when cryptocurrencies are handled better by the authorities could be a lot worse than the taxes that you have to pay on them.

This makes no sense.  Anyone can run a node.
True.  Your thread may be overrun with generic comments about Bitcoin Cash soon.

---

I agree with your point, to some extent.  Bitcoin is a permissionless system, and it's important to recognise that Bitcoin Core does not have infinite power, nor should it have.  I do think that people sometimes misunderstand how consensus works by smearing any proposals not approved by Bitcoin Core as an "attack" on BTC.  Meuh6879 created a nonsensical thread here, which neglected to mention that BIP 91 would not cause a chain split straight away and compared it to a mining pool having >51% of the hashrate.

However, the development team's reputation is extremely important in deciding whether to support a proposal, considering that we're dealing with a >$40,000,000,000 network here.

OP, every single statement in this post is a lie.  Please disregard it.

---

Bitcoin Unlimited was/is a proposed hard fork allowing a dynamic block size.  It would basically support continued onchain scaling.

However, Bitcoin Unlimited required 75% of blocks to signal for it for the hard fork to happen.  It failed to reach this support, and therefore Bitcoin Unlimited will likely never happen.

However, there is a second proposal with similar goals, entitled Bitcoin Cash.  The split that you're mentioning is going to form BTC and BCC (Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash).  Bitcoin Cash will also increase the max block size and support onchain scaling.  Bitcoin Cash does not require consensus - it will happen on August 1st regardless of its level of support.  I would say that it doesn't have too much support for now, and that a lot of people will sell it first as it's a low-consensus hard fork.  Its long-term support is harder to gauge.

It's both.  You're betting that your BTC will be worth more than the BCC in the future by doing a 1:1 trade, even though they are currently not worth the same.
I'm not.  When the BCC fork happens you will be able to trade it against BTC, and just like how it's worth much less than 1 BTC now, it will be worth less than 1 BTC then.  I didn't mention fiat.
Of course the current price doesn't matter to you, because you're getting BTC for several times less than it's worth.  You could literally buy loads of BCC on an exchange and then sell it to Roger Ver for four times as much if he took this trade/bet.  It's just dumb.
But you are not trading one unit of BTC for one unit of BTC.  BCC is created at a 1:1 ratio to BTC using the same blockchain, but it has different features and it was created several years later.  They are not the same thing.
I agree with this part, but the decentralised exchanges being developed still move with the market naturally.  They don't put arbitrary prices on things and then pretend that it's a normal trade.

Pretty much.  They caught the guy from Alpha Bay because he used his personal email in a "welcome email" to new users of Alpha Bay back in 2014.  That email included his first name and year of birth, and the authorities later found that he'd used the email for a PayPal account.

The problem is that these markets never expect to get so big, nor do they have so much initial investment.  So often their owners and workers are careless in the early days and they give away information that the authorities can start using even years later.

ChipMixer doesn't have millions to put aside to prepare for an influx of users either, which would explain why they're concerned about the recent influx of traffic.
But if the level of traffic stays high for longer, you'll get back to normal, right?

China's power is massively overrated.  Everyone assumes that the Chinese government is a puppet master behind the scenes that's brainwashing us all or something.  Even people who are not part of the government are being included in "China".

All countries are important as part of a decentralised network, and while Chinese people have too much power in mining, it's not a giant conspiracy from the government.  This kind of paranoia isn't healthy.

All these bets are really dumb.

It's not like Roger Ver is going to trade absolutely gigantic amounts of BTC for several times less BCC tokens than he could buy at the market price.

Just because Ver believes that BCC would become relevant in the future, doesn't mean that he thinks he can never get it for less than 1 BTC.

We'd all rather he didn't have that much BCC because he would push the market price way up and he would be able to manipulate it incessantly.

And the VirusTotal page for the link to download it shows one positive.

I usually steer clear of .exe files unless they're made by large, regulated companies or they're open source.  They're the home of viruses.

---

A lot of people here use Blockfolio, which is a phone app.  Recently it was believed that Blockfolio were spying on their users' holdings, but Blockfolio has denied this (and you could always just take privacy measures like decreasing your holdings by a factor of 10 or 100).

True, but it doesn't require a very high cost.  The OP could send around 0.01 BTC to Bittrex and start playing with their 50,000 satoshi orders.

The important thing is to have an extremely clear strategy, test it for a long time on Bittrex, and then get trading with larger amounts of coins.  You don't want to be one of the newbies who plays with fire and gets burnt.

Trading Forex first might be a good way to pick up these strategies, because it's also an accessible market but it's oriented around trading strategies.

However, don't get caught up with too much technical analysis.  Make sure you know what you're dealing with.