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.

I've always thought Google search trends are an underrated way to measure hype.

Bitcoin search trends right now are showing the apathy that some of you are talking about:  https://trends.google.co.uk/trends/explore?q=%2Fm%2F05p0rrx.

However, the cryptocurrency trends and blockchain trends have not been acting in the same way.  This could imply that users this time around have matured about the technology, and potentially that the speculation is less feverish (a bullish sign in the long-term).

I disagree.  All those people would have Bitcoin, but the majority chain would end up having the merchants and economic support.  There is a kind of herd movement, and that majority chain would still be decentralised just like the original Bitcoin has been for the past nine years.

Every time a bear market is looming (like it could be now), you'll see plenty of people creating reasons for why this, in particular, is dead or not worth as much as it is now.  Personally, I think that it's mostly wrong and that in a few years we'll be on a new problem that doesn't matter either.

The funny thing is that all those people who "called" the bear market will say "I told you so" when it starts going down... but they'll act mysteriously silent when it starts going way up again.

The bottom line is that the end is not going to come for a very long time, and that these are early days.  We're all waiting for something to happen, and something will either happen or it won't but either way, most of us will end up following along with whatever happens instead of confining ourselves to some little chain with 10% hash rate.

It can be done, and net neutrality laws are being eroded by some countries lately, including creating laws for tracking Internet activity and requiring websites to keep logs.

While this is worrying (and RodeoX was particularly scared about it, I recall), I see it as something that could have happened at any time.  There's a point at which that action would become so outrageous to the public that governments just can't get away with doing it, because the public uproar would be immense and would completely destroy their popularity.  Considering that the mainstream media seem to have softened up to Bitcoin somewhat recently, I see it as unnecessary for governments to try doing this, especially since they can basically track it anyway if they regulate it well enough.

Suspicion?  It's 100% obvious that it's trying to diminish UASF's support.  The whole point is to get it activated before UASF becomes too popular.  There's no way anything would have happened this month if it wasn't for UASF being a threat.
Honestly, I see that as unlikely.  Looks more like a conspiracy theory than anything particularly intelligent - after that there would just be the threat of a different UASF a bit later instead.

OK, fair enough.  That's a pretty likely outcome actually.  Litecoin, for example, settled for a while after SegWit activation before it got caught in the hype of the crypto bull market.  Bitcoin could do the same - people buy in when they expect SegWit to happen or when it's locked in, then they don't know what to do after that until other cryptos lead the way (probably bearish).

I'm not worried anyway.  I bought most of my coins way earlier than this, so I'm pretty safe with my stop loss set down low.

I think it's just people waiting for a future event.

SegWit not activated in July-August safely = 2014-ish behaviour, possibly moving into a bear market.

SegWit activated in July-August safely = moon.

Right now no one knows what's going on, so nothing is happening.

In bulk amounts that might be hard.  You could try Nicehash, but you can't know that your income will be steady.

You can't really start a cloud mining service, because almost everyone assumes they're scams (99.9% of them are), and you'd have to put a huge amount of work into something that's properly regulated/is legitimate.

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As a miner on a large scale, you're essentially a speculator as well.  If the price doesn't continue rising, then the difficulty might catch up with the price, at which point mining naturally becomes only just profitable.  If the price rises so much that the difficulty flies up, your machines might seem inefficient and you wouldn't get the profits anymore.

For now, you would get profits in ~6 months as Amph points out, but because of the difficulty it's unrealistic to expect that to actually happen.  I still think it's a moderately good investment, but you have to appreciate that this is a high risk/high reward choice for you.

The way I see it, it's impossible for a farm to be ethical because it's unnatural.  People can talk about "the food chain" all they want, but the reality is that they way animals are being killed is entirely unnatural, whether it's with a gun, a factory farm, or just a regular free range farm.  Humans would naturally be lower than, say, lions in the food chain, but if humans want to they can just shoot the lion with a gun.

The idea of animal products which are not meat is even more confusing, because cows only produce milk after having a child, much like what humans do.  Not only is it stealing the cow's milk which is supposed to be for cows, but cows produce far less milk after it would no longer be needed for their calf.  This means that far more cows are produced than the amount that are needed to stay on the farm, so inevitably the calves are taken from their mothers at birth and cows have to be killed to sustain the production of milk.

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Clarification:  vegetarianism is to not eat meat or fish.  If you eat fish, you're called a pescatarian.  If you don't eat meat, fish or any animal product, and you refrain from the use of animal products in your life e.g. leather, then you are a vegan.  A lot of people are getting confused about this.

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I also wish that people would stop saying "I eat what I want to" or statements of that sort.  They don't contribute anything to a discussion, because no government is telling you whether you can eat meat or not.

It's like as soon as people hear about Bitcoin and start using it, they just give up any normal rules of where they put their money, which is strange as hell considering that they should do the exact opposite and be much more careful than they are with fiat.

It's like, "hey, people use Bitcoin on Tor, so look at this online wallet that's on Tor!  Let's put our coins into that!"

No due diligence, no checking if they're a regulated company, no checking for information about the owners, nothing...

Same thing happens with investments.  Normally none of these people would give their fiat to a company that promises to pay them back >3% daily, but apparently with Bitcoin they feel it's acceptable.  Maybe it's a side effect of all the stories of people getting rich with Bitcoin that cause people to lose all of their judgement.

Aren't Bitcoin debit cards basically pointless anyway?

If you want to spend fiat in stores, why not just spend fiat instead of fooling yourself into thinking you're spending bitcoin?  It would make it so much easier for people to just spend bitcoin where it's actually accepted instead of relying on even more centralised services in order to let them spend fiat.

Still, I strongly doubt that more trusted services like Xapo or especially Bitpay would be stealing your ID.  It's just the same as giving your ID to any other service really.