No.  The miners direct their hashrate wherever they want.  The pool is just what they use to keep their income steady.

They could equally switch to a pool which is big enough for them to have steady income, has equally low fees (or lower) and supports the scaling solution that they want.

Miners act in their economic interest, and pools' hashrate can move around.

In the case of a more objective situation, like governments trying to screw around with what pools can do, a large amount of the miners would agree to switch to another pool which is not being controlled.

Admittedly there's a point at which finding an unregulated pool is hard or people don't care enough about it, if pools become very controlled.  But I don't see that as a significant threat, at least in the short term.

All you need to know that mining with PCs is completely worthless.  The damage that it does over time to your PCs outweighs the mining rewards by many times, and pools are unlikely to even let you withdraw the kind of dust that they would be producing.  Not to mention that even if there was no damage or electricity costs, it would take hundreds of years to reach ROI, at today's difficulty.

If you want to mine alts it's okay, but for BTC you need ASICs.
It's like running a specialised computer specifically to mine on a certain mining algorithm (in Bitcoin's case, SHA-256).  Nothing to do with PCs and considering how worthless PCs now are for mining, I wouldn't make that comparison.

Guys like Warren Buffet tend to avoid selling in bear markets.  People acting on emotions often end up losing money because of their fear of losing too much money, even though bear markets seldom last very long.

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All bubbles are a bit hazy.  If everyone knew it was a bubble, the bubble wouldn't have happened.  So all you can do is ride it out, and afterwards you can say "oh shit that was a bubble, good thing I bought ages before it" or you can say "phew good thing I didn't sell during those rallies".

However, do be warned that it's very common in bubbles (and the end of bull markets) for there to be a bull trap right after a dip.  It's a return to what you start thinking of as normal, but that doesn't tend to last.

They are not preparing to strike other countries.

Just like what the US and other Western countries do very frequently, they are testing weapons as a means of defense.

While I do not agree with the concept of mutually assured destruction, a state like North Korea which is isolated from the rest of the world and is subject to US sanctions would not feel safe from war if almost every opponent to them is participating in MAD.

To pretend that North Korea is so rogue that they would randomly drop nuclear bombs is plain immature in my view, regardless of whether or not you agree with the actions of the state or their leader.

ICOs are a load of shit. 

A lot of people who get involved in Ethereum-based ICOs like to talk about the issue of "Bitcoin maximalism", and people who believe that Bitcoin should or will be the dominant cryptocurrency forever. 

However, the whole idea of ICOs encourages this crazy dominance, by:

1.  Locking up loads of coins for a long time, reducing the supply and thus keeping the price up.
2.  Eating up most altcoins by having them created as tokens on the Bitcoin or Ethereum blockchain.

It's also dangerous, because any problem with the main blockchain then affects all these "decentralised" applications.

Implementing ICOs on Bitcoin would be no more than a hype machine and a lot of fancy words.

Rootstock attempt to implement smart contracts for Bitcoin.

See their website here.

However, I see smart contracts as a small addition to Bitcoin, and not as revolutionary or essential a technology as ETH makes them out to be.

They look very much like similar sites.  Sites such as truthwiki.org, conspiracy-theory based sites with similar clickbait titles and little scientific research.  The few of them which are not like this are generally still opinion pieces (e.g. http://ahrp.org/lies-damned-lies-and-medical-science/

Rational Wiki details a different way of using the argument by assertion logical fallacy:

If you can give me meta-analysis for several reputable studies suggesting that 90% of information doctors are relying on (very vague sentence there, I'll leave it open to your interpretation) are incorrect, then I'm listening.  Otherwise, it looks like you're getting caught up in clickbait.

Not to mention that Natural News hate Bitcoin anyway.

Looks to me like you just came back after a long period of inactivity.

When you weren't paying attention to your holdings, they went up very dramatically in value, didn't they? 

During that time that you weren't paying attention, I can guarantee you that there were many different situations in which people were saying the price could drop to zero.  If you had sold during that time when everyone was scared, you would have missed out on a big opportunity.  The same applies this time - just don't do it.

Worst case scenario is that there's a bear market.  If that happens, you don't sell, you buy more and don't give into FUD (provided you can afford to lose it).  Ideally, you'd ignore the whole situation and wait until later.

The time to sell is when you need the money.  Otherwise, while I'm no financial adviser, I wouldn't recommend it.

Risk free investments do not exist.  

The closest thing you can get is government bonds, but those are in fiat and the returns are very little.

As Bitcoin is an investment in itself as well as being a currency, all Bitcoin investments would have to avoid switching to fiat for any of the work involved.  If you invested your coins during the time, they would have to grow the investment by several hundred percent in terms of purchase power to give you any returns in Bitcoin at all.

The risks of investing in anything Bitcoin related far outweigh the returns in my view.  I would just hold your coins.

Did you know that as much as 100% of the statistics published on Natural News are made up on the spot?  It's true.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Argument_by_assertion.

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I really wish that these sites would back up their statements properly, because I agree with a few of the things that they say (although a lot of it, e.g. climate change being a lie, is just straight-up bullshit).  If they wrote some articles that contained real information instead of sensationalist clickbait bullshit, it would be much easier to promote some of their views to other people.

These clickbait sites wouldn't exist if you stopped supporting them.

BTC-E is Russian, and not regulated well enough to be safe.

You'll find that the Coinbase price is almost the same as the Bitstamp price, because both of those exchanges are fully functional, safe and regulated.

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I would suggest either using GDAX (Coinbase's dedicated exchange, with much lower fees), or Bitstamp (a trusted European exchange).
Alternatively, you could trade peer-to-peer using LocalBitcoins.

To be honest, it doesn't have much intrinsic value, because the open-source code can be copied and someone else creates a new cryptocurrency which is exactly the same.  The "limited supply" is only limited for this one thing, and there can be an unlimited number of other cryptocurrencies which also have that same "limited supply".

Admittedly, Bitcoin does have a huge brand and originality, but a better marketed coin would still have an effect (and ETH has, even though it's not much good).  What gives Bitcoin value is public support and faith.

But fiat currencies have absolutely no intrinsic value at all.  They lose value every year because they are not backed by even public support, and they're based on debt anyway.

So if you want an easy way to move money which has some kind of intrinsic value, Bitcoin is far better than any other monetary system that I can currently think of.

Technical analysis is extremely dumb.  It's basically a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I mean maybe there was a little bit of truth in these patterns, but almost all of it is just technical analysts doing exactly what they expect the pattern to cause.  If everyone agrees that a head-and-shoulders pattern is bearish, they start selling and then what they said becomes true.

There are a couple of real things which could mean something, like volume, but fundamental analysis is the only thing that's really meaningful here.

From most merchants' perspectives, there is no volatility at all.  They don't need there to be volatility, because as soon as they receive a payment they can convert their coins back into good old fiat, which is what they wanted all along.  The idea that they "accept Bitcoin" is misleading, because while you can pay in Bitcoin, what they're really looking for is fiat.

There are even companies like Bitpay which can let a merchant accept Bitcoin and then give them fiat deposits directly into their bank account without them having to lift a finger, and all this is done with just a 1% fee.

I know 1% sounds like a high fee, but Visa, PayPal and most other payment systems charge much higher fees than that.

So volatility absolutely doesn't stop merchants accepting BTC, nor is it something that can be changed easily.

Really?  Last time I checked ETH has quite a lot of nodes.  We can't get a 100% accurate estimate of how many Bitcoin full nodes there are, because sites like this are only talking about full nodes with open ports.

A lack of full nodes is a problem because of the importance of decentralisation and removing the control of entities such as banks.  However, fewer full nodes would not result in less scalability - Bitcoin and ETH are just not scaled properly, which does not relate to the exact node count or the exact amount of hashrate.  These things are about security, not scalability.

The coins in satoshi's known addresses have been left there and not moved.  It's possible that satoshi is afraid of doing so due to fear of his identity being tracked, or that he no longer has access to those addresses. 

It could also be that he simply doesn't intend to sell, and would rather spend the coins when he can (after all, he did create a "peer-to-peer electronic cash system" - why he would sell his real money for fiat I have no idea).

Also, the 1 million figure is quite unlikely to be true, and the couple of hundred thousand that he most likely has in reality would not crash the market as severely as you think, especially since it's extremely unlikely for him to offload all the coins at once and that even if he did, it wouldn't be the end considering trading volume of >1 billion dollars these days.

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The SEC were extremely open about their reasons for rejecting the ETF, and are a traditionally conservative institution.  I think this is childish reasoning from you.
As if no one's asked that before...

Taboo is mainly about social and religious restrictions, rather than legal ones.  Your link details the law about it in various countries, but that isn't relevant to whether Bitcoin would be preferred.

The point is that revealing your personal information to porn sites for payments is scary for some people because they want complete privacy about what they're doing (it's embarrassing).

The problem with too many of these sites accepting Bitcoin as payments is that they're law-abiding websites, and they could face backlash from the state if they accepted payments from minors or people in states where buying porn is illegal.

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While paying for porn is a very slowly dying thing IMO, it can still increase awareness.

I love the bit where the shopkeeper says not to spend Bitcoin, because it'll only go up in value.

I wonder how they think Bitcoin would go up in value if no one uses it and the supply increases...

Spamming the network gives a sense of urgency.  It gives miners an incentive to reach consensus (or other miners, if there's a certain agenda behind it).

However, I also don't buy into the narrative that it's a spam attack from "big blockers"... I feel that almost the same justification could be given to claim that people are doing this to push the LN and offchain transactions. 

There's no way of telling if it was an unknown force pushing for any solution at all, or if it was a group with a specific agenda on a specific side of the argument.  Or if there is, I haven't seen it yet.

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But there definitely was a spam attack.  There were a couple of addresses I was pointed to in that time with >100,000 dust transactions of the same amount, relentlessly in short time frames.

Using a TREZOR, I can say that it's working very well for me and that I haven't had any issues.  I've downloaded the recent software update and received significant amounts of BTC as well, no problem.

Ordinary PCs aren't very secure if they're connected to the Internet, and hardware wallets are much easier to get than a fresh PC, so it makes more sense IMO.

Due to a couple of things related to hardware wallets though (you give them your address for shipping, and you get the opportunity to upgrade with Satoshi Labs' software), paper wallets are still the most obvious choice.  Just don't knock hardware wallets because they're very good for everyday spending.