They also understand that a dramatically fluctuating value causes them to lose buying power.

Making pedantic points claiming that it's trading or that the price in fiat shouldn't matter would be meaningless (you're not quite saying that but implying it).  You could use the phrase "buying power", and it would mean the same thing.

Besides, many people are in Bitcoin to get more fiat.  It's a shame, but it's true.  We're waiting for real merchant adoption before people will stop paying attention.

All good mixers have a Tor mirror, and many mixers are only on Tor without a clearnet site.

Bitmixer Tor mirror:  http://bitmixer2whesjgj.onion/
Chipmixer Tor mirror: http://chipmixerwzxtzbw.onion/

And so on, and so forth...
True.  However, it's still dramatically safer to use a mixer.

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Chipmixer is legit, for now.  Mixers can go wrong at any time, but we've got only positive information about them so far.

Are you sure you were on the right site?  Bitblender's Tor mirror is http://bitblendervrfkzr.onion/, and they have an information site here which I believe is theirs.

Note:  if you decide to move to Bitmixer, make sure to keep their letter of guarantee so that you can show it if you get scammed again.

It's really impossible to give a black-and-white answer to this question.

You have blogs like 99bitcoins which are blatantly monetised to death with sponsorships, as you can clearly see from all the recommendations and reviews that they give as well as the ads all over the page and their Bitcoin faucet.  But despite all this, they're quite respected in the Bitcoin community and they have an alexa rank of about 14,000 (and under 5,000 in the US).

It's all about a few factors:

-Whether you can stick to it for long enough to build up a fanbase before trying to cover it in too many ads or sponsorships.
-Whether you can afford to hire several decent writers as well as yourself.
-Whether you can handle Google Adsense being bastards.

Permissioned blockchains would be completely separate from Bitcoin.  Banks can try to centralise Bitcoin and they might succeed, but they know perfectly well that there are an unlimited amount of potential altcoins and that at this point if people want decentralisation they will find it and they will use it.

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Although regulation will increase the price, because the Bitcoin price is mostly speculation and people feel better buying it when exchanges are safer.

-Don't use escrow sites, they're not very accountable for your actions.  Use a forum escrow, and check their recent trust.  Always make sure that the escrow talks to you directly and verify that you are sending to their public address (always verify their signature).

-Don't trade with other newbies.  Just don't do it.

-Don't deal with PayPal or other reversible money transfer systems.

-Don't trade altcoins unless you've done thorough research on the development team, why the coin needs to exist and other information, otherwise you're practically gambling and you're getting played by whales.

All block explorers will show that.  I personally find Blocktrail and Blockcypher to be very smooth block explorers, but many users will use blockchain.info.
Bitstamp doesn't charge fees for Bitcoin withdrawals. 

However, all professional exchanges set transaction fees themselves (on the actual transaction).  You must not be reading it correctly.  A professional exchange like Bitstamp will most likely set fees of >200 satoshi/byte, often higher, and will have bundled up these transactions into one for efficiency.

You should look at where it mentions the satoshi/byte of the transaction.  Ideally they will have set fees of >400 satoshi/byte, but anything over 200 satoshi/byte.

Post the transaction ID so that we can check.

No cryptocurrency investment is particularly "safe" due to the state of Bitcoin businesses.

Casinos, for example, are extremely poorly regulated and sometimes they can either run off or fail to make profits after a pretty small amount of time.  Even when diversifying some people have lost money in them from not doing their due diligence on the company and its intentions.

Really, you have no good choice.  You could just hold or you could invest in alts (give the top 10 a miss for now, too risky).

Many Core devs are against altcoins.  There's no point cherry picking one person with no actual evidence that he's investing in ETH, and then trying to pass it off as some kind of logical argument.

Don't forget the tin foil hat.

I've bought and sold more GBYTE than that on Bittrex and I've been fine.  There might be some other circumstances causing this situation.

Plus, 0.11 BTC is hardly a "large amount" for them to properly scam anyone for.

Bullshit.  Genesis Mining is a super shady company.

Even worse, their two-year contracts will never reach ROI.  Your mining profits rely on the price rising constantly, because the difficulty takes a long time to catch up with the price when the Ether price rises 3000%, for example.

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Your choices (all of them poor) are:

-Hashnest
-Hashflare
-Genesis Mining.

If you want to see your coins again, don't do it.  And any site with a referral program offering >5% is a scam or will never reach ROI.

Well, let's evaluate their characteristics:

Bitcoin - long-term security/code, making fatal bugs and other major issues unlikely.  High fees, making it incapable of smaller transactions (for now).  Great for big transactions and safer businesses.

Ethereum - shorter-term support which grew extremely suddenly, making major issues more likely but still not particularly.  Implements smart contracts, and is good as a platform for other cryptocurrency tokens to be created.

The reason that ETH is mainly just a platform for smart contracts is because the fees are also high, just lower than Bitcoin, and it's currently not scalable (plus the centralisation problem, which makes innovation potentially compromise security).  If a cryptocurrency were to replace Bitcoin so to speak, it would be one that actually has low fees.

This is the amount sent overall in the block, with all the transactions in it.  That means that the one with 37,000 BTC in it was all of the 2,291 transactions in the block.

There have been way crazier transactions in the past, such as this one (sending 194,993 BTC a long time ago).

If you're talking about it being unusual that the mean average amount sent in a transaction is a large amount, that's just because fees are very high.  Microtransactions are impractical, so people send large ones instead because Bitcoin is good for that (and very secure).

Simple question gets a simple answer:  because more transactions are being sent than the amount that the network can handle.

If you based it on that, it would be on the assumption that every transaction has to be confirmed while the network is in this state.  That would mean that as demand continues to exceed supply, the amount of time you have to wait for your transaction to be confirmed gets longer and longer.

The point of fees is to prioritise your transaction so that it gets in earlier.  Of course recently this has changed in that you have to pay a fee, but it's still similar in that to get your transaction confirmed earlier it's justified for you to pay a higher fee.

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Plus, this isn't something that can be implemented anyway because miners are working on a profit incentive.  All talk about this would just be about morals speculation of what could theoretically happen, even when it's extremely unlikely.

True, but it's mainly to do with a consensus.  If a large majority of hashrate and a lot of businesses start supporting a new proposal, it's fine for it to take some time before the code is actually developed.

It's not really an "empty promise" this time, because it's DCG actually telling everyone about who has now agreed on something.

Obviously time is always needed to peer review code etc, but I don't think that any of these companies will be saying "nah, this line of code is wrong, guess we can't support that anymore", when the points are all there.

Changing your password wouldn't do a lot if you have a keylogger.  Often that's the best way that hackers will find your passwords, and they can end up getting your funds out more easily than you'd expect.

Also, you could have used that password/email combination on another site which was less trustworthy, and they decided to try that combination on several major services.

These scenarios always exist and 2FA is the only way to be safe.  Strong passwords just don't cut it, all they do is mean that people couldn't crack your password quickly with a computer.

The UK stance is pretty good - just tax it as a commodity.

When buying it, it should be subject to VAT in the same way that other goods, digital or not, are.

That said, I hugely benefit from governments being incompetent and I highly doubt that HMRC, which deals with UK tax, would be competent enough to actually find and tax anyone who holds Bitcoin.

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I hope they don't clarify it or crack down on Coinbase.  The longer that cryptocurrencies are basically free without anyone getting prosecuted for tax evasion, the better.

Many of the exchanges are well behind.  The Coindesk price BPI is showing the price hovering around $3000, but the Bitstamp price isn't even $2950, nor is the Coinbase, BTC-E or Bitfinex anywhere near there either.

From most of our perspectives it's still falling short.

I won't be excited until the Bitstamp price has stayed >$3000 for a couple of days without a correction.

Alternative implementations make up more like 15%.  But Core is still the reference client, yes. 

I thought BITMAIN and many other miners/large block supporters would agree with SegWit if it involved an increase in block size and a hard fork?

What changed?

I think you need to read up a bit more on hardware wallets.

They give you a seed which lets you recover your funds from many major wallets (in TREZOR's case Electrum for example, as well as many others), or you can recover from another TREZOR.  When you recover from another TREZOR you don't even expose your seed to the computer, because your TREZOR randomises which words you have to put in, making it very difficult to find the order of the 24 words.

This makes hardware failure, loss or even stealing basically irrelevant, unless they take your seed.  Most modern robbers would only take it because they see a piece of technology, so they wouldn't search for your seed when it's hidden in a bank safety deposit box for example.

You also have passphrase encryption, and you can use multiple passphrases and hidden wallets to protect against 5-dollar wrench attacks.

It's not the most secure thing in the world but for someone who's not very tech-savvy it's extremely good.