Wow, it is rising fast, SegWit supports reached 58% it means that we are only 17 percent away from reaching consensus (75%)
So this is the reason for sudden price of Litecoin rise? Insider news sure traveled fast. If the situation continue we will have LTC SegWit next week.

Basic income won't be implemented, not in the near future anyway. I still think that more personalized welfare systems are better.
Pension received should depends on the financial situation of the person. It will also further decrease the motivation to work among poor citizens.

Basic income would make everything more expensive, therefore will create in more inequality because rise of taxes - the only viable way to finance basic income.

Hard Fork eventuality is not possible right now, that is the reason price of Bitcoin stabilized.
We reached stalemate with BU being supported by ~37% hash power and SegWit by ~29%.
As you said hardcore speculators moved to altcoins: Ethereum, Ripple, Litecoin, Round, PIVX, Decred are being pumped like crazy.

Are you interested because we have Decred's pump right now?

This altcoin might be labeled as 'experimental' on so many levels that I would be scared to hold it long term.
Good advice: better wait when the pump will be over, don't try to catch the rising wave - it will crash soon.

MLM is not a great way to distribute a coin.
It might be effective at first but when coin will reach certain level of recognition, we will see argument from haters that coinX is a ponzi coin.
It will be enough to tarnish coin reputation. Building economic asset on MLM is not good way if you want to build long lasting economic network.

Similar to gold Bitcoin will never lose all value, at least not in the foreseeable future.
From the other hand, US dollar - from 1988 to 2017 lost exactly 105.9% purchasing power due to overwhelming inflation rate.
Why would anyone want to keep USD (or any other FIAT with infinite supply) as long term investment is beyond me.

If Satoshi wanted everything to be done on-chain forever he wouldn't invent gradual block subsidy decline/mining reward halving.
We are having cheap transaction fees because there is block reward still being distributed, namely transactions are subsidized by the block rewards.

Normally I would suggest that you can't forget about Litecoin, there is no need to keep track of price movement of this coin anymore.
But there is huge pump Litecoin pump going on, price from forever stable ~$4 soared to $6.92 - so either LTC is waking up, or it is a dead cat bounce.

If you want to be 'progressive' you can try Ethereum, but if you focus on Bitcoin alone it would ideal.

Talk about misleading/clickbait title to gain attention/views. Roger Ver has expressed his interest, nothing more.
He did not agreed to trade, no specifics of the deal were shared. At this point we can label this 'deal' as publicity stunt/prank.
Bitcoin Unlimited support is not going to reach 51% of hash power any time soon.

Adding coins to use directly might be impossible as Ethereum is the backbone of the system.
But if needed, adding instant exchange method, something like Shapeshift to the site is an option.
I would work like this: user is depositing bitcoin (maybe other alts as well) and has option to convert it instantly to Ethereum.

We don't need bigger blocks right now. What we truly need is better protection from spam.
Say, we increase block size to 2 MB today. That barely solve anything, space is still limited.
As long as there will be someone willing to pay for spam, and no countermeasures, problem with block size will remain.

Stick to the bitcoin and collect your money in the future. Altcoins comes and goes, Ethereum is like flavour of the month, move on.
All it takes for flock to panic is little bit of FUD. LISTEN! Community needs to understand it is being manipulated... once again.
Bitcoin Unlimited soon will be gone like Bitcoin Classic and XT before it.

Receiving fee? You mean that someone will have to pay for it? No. That is not how the bitcoin normally works.
The sender is the only one who need to pay transaction fee. But you don't want to use BTC for tipping people anymore.
The fee needed to send that 0.0005 BTC would be... around 0.0005 BTC

Buying and holding coins would be be ideal. You see, with just owning bitcoins you are investing and can potentially achieve great profits, there is no need to risk even more.
Bitcoin prices rose more than 100% in 2016, isn't that good enough for you? With mining, both physical and cloud you have different kind of dangers waiting for you.
Standard mining is not worth the hassle, it is no use to compete with Chinese miners, and it is too risky to buy contract for extended period of time from cloud mining company.

I was under the impression that this type of pump and dump actions are happening pretty much all the time.
What else you can think of when price of altcoin X suddenly skyrocket without any valid reason or news to back the gain up?
Just read altcoin speculation section, you will find there many threads about sudden pumps... We are not discovering anything here.
Organize your pump squad and your are pretty much ready to go.

You are right when you said that ETF is a way to allow institutional capital to invest into BTC. But it wouldn't be direct investment.
But companies which invested in ETF wouldn't own their own bitcoins. Shareholders do not directly own or have any assets beside shares issued by ETF.

The SEC wrote:

"The Commission believes that, in order to meet this standard, an exchange that lists and trades shares of commodity-trust exchange-traded products ("ETPs") must,
in addition to other applicable requirements, satisfy two requirements that are dispositive in this matter.

First, the exchange must have surveillance-sharing agreements with significant markets for trading the underlying commodity or derivatives on that commodity.

And second, those markets must be regulated."

So unless we can somehow regulate bitcoin (haha, fat chance) there is no way that SEC will approve any ETF based on any form of decentralized cryptocurrency.
I don't want to speculate that we will NEVER see any ETF appeted, but it is hard to imagine in the foreseeable future.

We don't need a hard fork, everything wrong with bitcoin today can be fixed with soft fork. We don't even need bigger blocks right now.
There is problem with how data is allocated in the blockchain - All legitimate uses of the blockchain currently amount to approximately 750k/block average.
Just look at how  community is divided over the eventuality of forking bitcoin, uncontroversial hardfork is impossible.

https://np.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/61yvvv/request_to_core_devs_please_explain_your_vision/dficjhj/

 

It is useless to think that after Winklevoss Coin ETF was rejected we will have another ETF accepted.
SEC stated that they are not approving COIN because there is risk inherently linked to bitcoin features.
Mainly fact that bitcoin can't be regulated and controlled - so ETF very little control over the asset itself.
To be accpted by SEC, ETF needs to come up with some solution to minimize risks of investors to suffer extreme losses first.

Altcoins are always announced that they are "accepted by merchants", "traded on top cryptocurrency exchanges" and "supported by a wide range of services".
The reality is that: you won't buy anything with 99.9% altcoins, the only exchange where you can trade is Yobit and by wide services acceptance 
- altcoin creators meant that there is a wallet supporting their coin or maybe something like block explorer, that is basically it.