At this point it's normal for even online wallets to offer access to your private keys at some point and less trust in their services.  Services such as Green Address, BitGo and Blockchain.info offer you at least some access to your private keys.

The only wallets that shouldn't do this are exchanges and wallets which try to interact with fiat in other ways (such as Xapo's debit card).  However, these things should be opt-in features which are distinct from the wallet service which they should be providing.

As for faucets, I suspect that they acted similarly to a "faucet cache" in that sense - receiving larger transfers of BTC at once from the faucet, and then adding the tiny amounts to users' accounts from the money they had already received from the faucet.

In that sense they would still be acting the same with faucets today as they were before, and they have become no less trustworthy.  The only difference is that the BTC transaction fees are now too high for them to cover on their own while still having a profitable business model.

Attacks become harder over a long time because developments in hardware can allow the blocksize to gradually rise, which means that they have to spend more to push the transaction fee up to the same amount.
Forks are irrelevant.  That's the market's decision.
Fair enough.  I would be using Monero by now though.
That's a good thing.  There are more than enough units because each coin is 100,000,000 units.
That happens naturally from the price.  If the price decreases, so does the difficulty.
Fair enough.  Those are scaling problems which will hopefully become less prominent with Lightning and other solutions.
That's always going to happen in an asset unless it is globally adopted.  The same thing happens with gold.

At least it's not just decreasing forever like fiat though.
?

Bitcoin fees are nothing to do with the amount being sent.  Had you sent a $10,000 transaction with the same number of inputs (probably one or two in this case), you would have had the same fee.  Bitcoin transaction fees are about the size of the transaction in bytes.

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If you're concerned and you particularly need to send a smaller amount, you could just:

-Set a lower fee (one that will still get confirmed eventually)
-Use a transaction accelerator with a low-fee transaction
-Use a SegWit-compatible wallet such as the Ledger hardware wallet to send SegWit transactions and reduce fees.

Can you please stop making up numbers?  The rise to >$1000 was in 2013, not 2012.

Also, the price at the start of 2017 was $972 according to coinmarketcap.

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Ignoring news and negative situations does not mean that BTC is more "resilient" than before.  It's important to recognise that some of this price rise has been caused by "new" money which was not aware of the previous situations BTC was in and they could still be weak hands for all we know.

It's more likely that the market thinks the positive news (particularly SegWit) outweighs the negative news for the time being.  This will not remain forever - as we know, there will always be bearish periods for assets.

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IMO, the price will remain reasonably high until about mid-October.  Then it'll all be down to the outcome of the New York Agreement.

The main reason that gold was/is so valuable is basically just because it was an interesting asset with physical scarcity and governments could therefore use it to back fiat money (which of course they no longer do).

While I find it hard to believe that the whole global economy would switch over to a new asset, so I don't think this scenario would ever happen, it's important to recognise that volatility is not an inherent feature of BTC - it's just the situation which it is currently in.

Err, how do you think that buying billions and billions of dollars worth of BTC would theoretically affect the price?

IMO it mainly depends on how high the fees are relative to just spending BTC directly.

If you live in the US, you can buy most goods from actual BTC merchants or from Purse (excluding perhaps the most basic things like food, but personally I hold some fiat as well as BTC).

The fees would only be worth it if either you don't live in the US or Europe (a country with less BTC acceptance from merchants), or if you hold most of your savings in BTC and would use it a hell of a lot to make up for the crazy ordering fees.

Personally I live in Europe so I can just keep using my Xapo card.

Are you sure that you're capable of reading three paragraphs?

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It's not a good idea to treat cryptocurrencies as a good asset solely because they went up in value.  If you're trying to argue that they're a good asset, you have to provide genuine reasoning for it.

The more people that have your attitude, the less people there are that would regard it as a good asset when the value decreases.

Considering how easy it is to convert between BTC and other cryptocurrrencies, it shouldn't make much of a difference how new it is as long as you can send it reasonably easily.  Might as well just go with a coin that attempts to be ASIC-resistant (most of the newer ones), if you're desperate to mine with a GPU.

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IMO it's fine to have choice.  BCH still exists so if people want to mine it they can go ahead and do so.  Considering that you can mine it with BTC hardware it makes sense to have an easy way to switch.

Let's do a fact check on this from a neutral (we're all biased, but less annoying at least) perspective.

1.  Vote manipulation - no proof.
2.  Astroturfing - no proof.
3.  Bought accounts to push agenda - no link to Roger Ver, but could be true (seems likely).  You should switch it to "an account" and "bought or hacked" as this is one account and becoming active after a long time suggests that it could have been hacked.  Also be tentative here, because this is reasoning rather than evidence.
4.  MemoryDealers.com founder Roger Ver abuses admin access at Blockchain.info - yep.  Ver stepped out of line here.
5.  Roger buying likes on twitter - you would have thought that with his thousands of BTC, he would have done a better job of it.  Especially considering that the vast majority of top comments on his posts are negative.  I can see how this is potentially shady, but still not really proof.
6.  Antpool was tagged and they responded to it.  I don't see the connection.  There's nothing wrong with them knowing ViaBTC's policy.

Overall, I don't see any particularly good evidence.

You'll have to rely on Poloniex's customer support, which means you have to rely on nothing.

It's good really though - it means that you can make the good decision not to trade on their shit exchange and go to somewhere like Bittrex that acts normally most of the time.
Based on their current trading volume of $400,000,000 in the last 24 hours, they would be raking in $800,000 per day in revenue from their 0.2% fees (400000000 x 0.002 = 800000).

Before they become so terrible that many people moved to Bittrex, they had a trading volume of over a billion dollars per day.  You would have thought that pulling in over a million dollars per day for several months would lead them to start hiring just a few customer support staff, but no.  It's either about the worst incompetence in the world or it's a means of keeping their customers' money before they get verified to withdraw it (so that they can manipulate the market).

Based on this thread, I'm guessing that you're a spammer who was kicked out of one of Lutpin's signature campaigns and then started an account dedicated to discrediting anyone who is against spam.

The Pharmacist believes that signature campaigns are responsible for problems on the forum:



That would easily explain your personal vendetta against The Pharmacist.

You don't know what activation is.
You don't know what locking in is.
scam
skam/Submit
nouninformal
1.
a dishonest scheme; a fraud.

https://bitcoincore.org/en/2016/01/26/segwit-benefits/ - please point out what Bitcoin Core said here which was objectively a lie that they were aware of at the time.

Basically what I'm saying is that you don't know what a scam is.

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It's this kind of misunderstanding of what proposals are supposed to achieve that results in all this FUD happening now.  SegWit is not supposed to make everything 100% perfect overnight.

Well I hope the BTC TV channels are as good as the "fiat TV" channels.

I suppose people are going to spend most of their day discussing the implications of nodes/hashrate/pools/forks?

Also, I don't think there are actually 50 trillion dollars in circulation, so it would require hyperinflation of the dollar over the next year for this to happen.

This is confusing as hell.  If they're not going to mine SegWit transactions, why would they signal for SegWit and join in with the New York Agreement?

Either it means that they want to make the November block size increase appear more necessary, or that they are categorically opposed to SegWit as a soft fork at all.  It could be some innocent mistake, but it doesn't seem likely.

For now, mempools are still large and Antpool needs to stop ignoring people's transactions.

We've already seen the first block over 1MB mined by Bitfury.  However, Antpool has been mining a lot of empty and small blocks.

Considering that they're supposed to be in favour of larger blocks, it doesn't really make sense, but it's certainly not being helpful.

Looks like the Ledger and TREZOR wallets are integrating SegWit very soon, after which I will be sending and receiving cheaper transactions.

I don't see why that's true.  Seems like it would just mean that some company produces the most efficient GPU instead of most efficient ASIC miner and then there can be centralisation of that instead.  Sure, small miners could get involved but they would still be mining at big pools.

Pools would be pretty much the same as well I imagine.  

A solution would be changing the block time to LTC's 2.5 minutes or so (then of course adjusting the block size, difficulty adjustment time, block reward etc to make this work).  Then hopefully miners would feel more comfortable using smaller pools because there would be less variance in their income.  I suppose if you did this you could simultaneously switch to a GPU-friendly algorithm as well.

According to Wikipedia the drug is illegal in a lot of countries and is a "Schedule 1 Controlled Substance" in the US.  Looks like the OP is selling an illegal drug.

We're on the clearnet on an unrelated forum so there's no way we should be giving advice on how to sell that.  

If you want OP, you could go on the Dream Market subreddit or if you want to discuss illegal information you should try going on the darknet.  Alpha Bay and Hansa Market are closed down so I suppose Dream Market is your main option.

They treat this like it's some shocking new revelation which has just been discovered.

Anyone who actually knows what they're talking about and gets even the most basic details of sending BTC transactions understands that BTC was never 100% anonymous, nor will it ever be.

If you're clever you can get around blockchain analysis though.  I highly doubt that the authorities caught the most privacy-centric darknet users, even when they seized Alpha Bay and Hansa Market.  They can catch some, but the Alpha Bay guy that they caught was caught for using his personal email in the past - nothing to do with BTC at all.

A large amount of people here are only involved in BTC for two reasons.

Either they're disillusioned with the banking system in general and debt-based fiat currencies, or they're moderately dumb in that they just look at high returns and assume that they will continue exponentially until they're rich. 

The latter is a self-fulfilling prophecy which gets weeded out in each bear market and then builds up in each bull market.  The former is a somewhat reasonable thought, but is often uttered by people who are otherwise irrational about similar topics or believe too strongly in modern conspiracy theories.

Personally I view the situation in a similar way to you, but I think that other people can get petty about it.

A large and important reason for Bitcoin's creation is the freedom from bank-controlled fiat currency.  If a bank wants to increase the supply in a cryptocurrency, they would have to hard fork and update software each time, which the public would not be able to follow, nor would they want to.

So if the bank wanted to create a cryptocurrency, they would have to either:

-Create a centralised coin which crypto enthusiasts decide not to use because of their original reasons for using BTC
-Create a decentralised coin which they don't have much control over, which is pointless as they wouldn't have any more power than they can have in BTC.