the bitcoin gold fork is just a spinoff. it's no big deal. it's an altcoin and the developers aren't pretending it's anything else, so i don't see why it wouldn't happen. here are links to their twitter and website.

if you hold BTC and you control the private key, then yes, you should get some of the new altcoin in that private key when the fork is launched. i heard there is a pre-mine, though, so i'm not sure if you get 1:1.


no one knows. it seems like the bip148/bitcoin cash debacle opened up a whole new can of worms and we are dealing with the consequences. forkers on all sides now seem to be intent on actually forking rather than simply talking about it for months and years (per the old tradition).

they won't respond from these accounts anymore. they are trying to appear as if btc-e is completely dead and the database and obligations of users were "bought" by an "investment company" which launched WEX. it makes no sense, but whatever.

their twitter: https://twitter.com/WEXnz
no bitcointalk account that i know of. support is at: https://wex.kayako.com

unfortunately, btc-e was always very reliable and their interface worked perfectly. but when things occasionally go wrong, their support is terrible. seriously, if you have a russian-speaking friend, now is the time to reach out to him. i know westerners who got permanently locked out of their accounts when they lost 2FA. my russian friend had it sorted in one day (with 2-week lockout period).

the thing here is that clearly they do not have a solution yet for ip whitelist/2FA problems. and like i said, sadly, some users have been permanently locked out of their accounts because of these issues --- and this was before the FBI seizure. many people have given the same report: back and forth with support, providing document after document, answering questions about funding deposits and proving control of depositing addresses, then silence......

on its face, that's what it looks like. but i suspect it's a bit more complex than that. pre-fork, i think that most of the network disconnecting from your node would be a deterrent for anyone considering running a btc1 node. in other words, it reinforces the perception that the fork is a minority fork. that's what this is about: perception.

to consider another example..... what would people think if core had released an update that disconnected from all bip148 nodes? surely, this would have reinforced the notion that bip148 was a minority fork. of course bip148 supporters would not want that perceptual baggage, in spite of the need for preferential peering. if core had done so, what would luke's next move have been? double down and start preparing for a POW/difficulty adjustment hard fork for the bip148 chain?

yes, but not without costs. viabtc was a front for bitmain, and bitmain has invested massively into mining farm infrastructure in china. mining operations will move across the border, but the cost is a matter of scale. a casual miner that needs to sell a few rigs is nothing. bitmain is another matter entirely. i think his comment was aimed at chinese miners -- and particularly industrial miners -- not bitcoiners in general.

i think there was also some fear about a huge drop in hashrate (and subsequent escalation in block time/congestion on the network) if the government followed through with the ban. naturally, it takes time to move and or/sell equipment; it wouldn't be an overnight process. and i'm sure that bitmain profits from cheap, skilled chinese labor. that also can't be replaced overnight, and accordingly, there could be a vacuum left in the chip manufacturing industry.

no, it didn't. that's just apophenia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia

at the time, the bitcoin price had already been experiencing a monstrous rally for ~10 weeks. the 2011 bubble highs were surpassed before the cyprus event even happened.

people always search for fundamental news to explain price action. it's often pointless and illogical. the correct explanation is that demand for BTC in the lead-up to the cyprus bailout was already massively outweighing supply. a bubble/hype cycle was already occurring. and i'd hesitate even now to say that we have reached the mainstream. 2013 was the tip of the iceberg.

there's no comparison between the two. bitmain spun off bitcoin cash in hopes that the bitcoin unlimited community was bigger than it really was. regardless of the economic activity on the network, bitmain is the biggest miner in the world, and bitpay and some major exchanges like bitfinex support it.

i haven't heard of any such support for the fork this month. 0.05BTC sounds like a longshot given that it doesn't seem to have any fundamental innovations or strong backing. their plan seems to be to capitalize on the current anti-bitmain sentiment..... come to think of it, that might work out for them.

that sucks. this is one of the fears that drove me to take the refund before WEX launched, even though i knew i was likely giving away a lot of money. maybe you could try selling the account on the digital goods subforum ... maybe a non-US person would be willing to verify. but you'd have to take a big pay cut.


2FA =/= outsourcing security to a third party. a TOTP token is generated by the service provider only once. after that, the codes can be generated by any number of authenticator apps. you can have multiple authenticator apps on each phone, tablet, etc, so you don't need to rely on any one third party. just like a private key, the user has access to the token.

the main problem here is that users don't take 2FA seriously. they quickly put the token on their main phone without backing it up anywhere, then they cry when they lose their phone. one should always have tokens backed up on multiple devices, and written down on a piece of paper as well.

i think part of it has to do with the position of china with regard to mining. bitmain owns most of the market for ASIC manufacturing. side note on that -- it's really interesting to see that they are only accepting BCH for their next batch of miners. it's brilliant: they are leveraging their market share to force retail customers to prop up the price of BCH.

chinese pools also account for a majority of the global hash rate; nothing to sneeze at there. chinese exchanges also helped to fuel the 2013 bubble, long before the volume manipulation started happening years later. back then, it certainly felt like huobi and mt gox ran the market. after gox was gone, huobi was who i followed for price analysis for the next 2 years. maybe other people got used to it, too.

re-applying.

Username: figmentofmyass
Post Count: 467+1
BTC Address: 122h7dmX8vcdNnWjfbz1eevD8tfcJasBWV

here's a good reason: the potential contentious hard fork and chain split that may occur in < 2 months. i'd like to think that the whole thing will be called off, but the segwit2x fork is backed by a supermajority of hashpower, and big industry players (exchanges, wallets, payment processors) like bitflyer, coinbase, blockchain.info, shapeshift.io, bitpay and others.

if there is a split from core nodes and two chains emerge, especially with no replay protection, that could lead to major market confusion and network disruption. chaos could ensue and investors could be scared off. and in the run-up to the fork, there will a lot of uncertainty about what might happen. so people can probably be expected to sell in anticipation.

i wouldn't necessarily say that. let's give it a little time to see what kind of regulations are put forth. it's the same as china---regulators saw so much money pouring into unregulated markets (where many scams are proliferating). it seems that they are merely placing restrictions on korean institutions, saying that they can't participate in ICOs. i bet it was a result of the kakao/upbit deal, which could bring an explosion of new korean investment into altcoins and ICO tokens.

regulators don't know how to handle it. i hope that they will land on the side of reason, seeing that prohibitions will just drive domestic investment underground and overseas. that will only deprive the state of tax revenues and give them less oversight of AML issues and capital outflows.

the possibility is always there. bitcoin's value comes from its network, and what happens if most of its users migrate to a different currency? well, most of the value will go with it. that's literally what will happen if the segwit2x fork goes as planned---the btc1 devs and NYA companies think that most people will migrate to the new fork since most miners are on board.

i'd say the possibility that bitcoin is "phased out" is unlikely. i'd give it maybe ~5% chance. that accounts for existential protocol failure (due to quantum computing, broken hashing algorithm, etc) and the possibility that an altcoin overtakes it.

actually, there could be 4 coins: bitcoin, bitcoin cash, bitcoin segwit2x, and bitcoin gold. that's right, there's a new hard fork gaining traction that will change to a memory-hard POW algorithm to return to a gpu-mining economy rather than one dominated by asics.

regarding the OP's prediction..... i had similar thoughts. i was torn between that scenario and masterluc's bearish scenario to the lower $2000s. before all this bad news started hitting today/yesterday, i was 60-40 bullish. now i'm neutral or maybe even leaning bearish. hopefully my sentiment is wrong because i'm not selling anything right now.

that's not necessarily true. it creates more friction between CNY and cryptocurrency -- that i can agree with. and this could drive away mainstream investors. however, the flip side is that black market commodities tend to rise in value, not fall.

more importantly, many traders/investors/miners may just move their activities outside of china's jurisdiction. i'm sure that many chinese traders have already migrated from okcoin and huobi to japanese and korean exchanges, or international chinese platforms like okcoin.com.

i'm excited to see what happens in the next 1-2 years. segwit activation has enabled a lot of future innovations like schnorr aggregate signatures, MAST and the lightning network.

it's too early to say what the topography of the lightning network would look like (i.e. whether it would be centralized/hub-and-spoke), but it's fair to say that early testing shows promise. these things will allow lower fees -- perhaps much lower fees. for now, though, i agree with you. fees are too high to transact with the expectation of instant confirmation. but it's cheap and possible to send with 1-2 satoshis/byte and wait a day or two for confirmation.

in other words, it's a good way for scammy developers to make some bitcoin profits quickly through a pre-mine. the price pumps initially, in line with the launch of the marketing campaign. over time, the price dies and never recovers. i won't be surprised if projects like deep onion and POStoken go nowhere.

airdrops shouldn't define a currency. for it to be viable, it has to be a small portion of the supply given in each airdrop. bitsend is a good example. each round is chump change if you want to immediately dump for BTC or USD. that discourages dumpers from joining in the first place, and encourages long term holding. i think other dev teams should learn from this.

well, the deep onion project is trying to prevent that kind of dumping by requiring that 90% of the airdropped coins be kept in the recipient's airdrop address for the entirety of the campaign. if they move them, they will be blacklisted.

i think a better way to run an airdrop is to do smaller airdrops incrementally over time (not 10% of the supply all at once, causing dumping). one example of this is bitsend, which is running a 3-year airdrop. it's held its value fairly well (certainly compared to deep onion), but it's sort of gotten lost in a sea of altcoin and token launches in the last year.

in the long term, no. but your logic makes no sense to a trader. the value of BTC dropped like 90% from top to bottom after 2013. wouldn't you rather secure some of those profits, rather than holding the whole time and losing 90% of your money? holding through those types of losses can be very hard psychologically, and often pushes people into selling the bottom.

it's important -- both financially and psychologically -- to take profit at some point. that leads to the question: you say "just buy the dip." well, where does the dip end? was $3000 the end of the dip? or could the price still drop another 35% from there in november? people thought $400 was the bottom of the dip, years ago...... we ended up going sub-$200. "buy and hold" is great after a long term correction. not after hundreds of % gains in less than a year.

the annoying thing about charlie's comments is that the exchange ban wasn't FUD, and that's what drove the price down below $3000. the market didn't react all that much to the FUD about the potential bans on mining and the network itself. i'm tempted to say that the market was already headed there anyway, and that the china news just helped it along.

i will note that btcdrak is the one who dropped the rumor about the government plan to block the network....


previous times, it was only rumors. this time, they acted harshly and swiftly. i'm still not sure whether i believe that we are in the clear now regarding more action from the chinese government. but the tweets from charlie do make me feel a bit better.

i'm guessing you don't mean the "return to normal" phase of the bubble chart, but it may have been the perfect term to use. after every bubble pop, BTC has always had a massive bounce (past the 61.8% fib line) that has resembled the "return to normal" phase before a significant decline in price (if not an outright crash). so in that sense, even if the bubble has popped for now, $4500 is entirely possible before more decline. i'm not sure that we've topped, i'm just throwing this out there...