Stellar Lumens (number 9 at time of writing) is blatantly a giant pump and dump coin.  It would be ignorant to argue that pump and dumps can only be on coins with a miniature trading volume - on the contrary, many big altcoins have major pump and dumps.  There was a point a couple of years ago went Litecoin went suddenly up to about $50 and then dropped down several times again.

Collateral is an item given for a loan.  For example, I could have a computer hardware part worth $120.  I ask someone for a loan.  The person takes my computer hardware part and gives me a loan of $100.  This way, if I fail to repay the loan, they can sell the hardware part and not lose money.

To take loans without any reputation/trust, you will need collateral, especially for significant amounts like 0.25 Bitcoin.  This could be any digital goods as well, such as an altcoin, but notably if you had that sort of thing you probably wouldn't need a loan right now.

Looks like Kwukduck was wrong, once again.  The "balloon deflating" was a slight bear trap and the price is now back up to around $1800 where it was before.

Bitcoin's price fluctuations often work in pump and dumps of increasing sizes.  Three have already happened and after each there was a significant bear market.  Based on the changing sizes of those pumps, a pump and dump would currently require the price to rise to several thousand, and this isn't a pump.  We get the same idea looking at fundamental causes of the price.

It's unlikely to be an inside job.  Bitstamp is subject to EU regulations and audits which makes it very difficult for them to pull off such a maneuver. 

The chances are that you had a keylogger - a type of malware that many antivirus programs can't detect.  It monitors everything you type so that the virus can find details about bank accounts, potentially e-mail accounts, and other sensitive information.  I would suggest that you instantly factory reset your computer, set up a new operating system and more.  DO NOT ACCESS YOUR BANK ACCOUNTS.  The keylogger may have been monitoring your activity for weeks before to pull this off.

This is why many people hold their Bitcoin on computers that never have access to the Internet, on hardware wallets and in paper wallets when they're intending to hold a significant amount for a long period.  I'm extremely sorry for your loss and hopefully this can serve as a lesson to others that holding your Bitcoin online is never safe.

Currency is based on storage and people's confidence in it.  The only reason that fiat has value is because it is given value by a government and people agree with that value.  The difference is that Bitcoin's supply is genuinely scarce, so it doesn't make everyone lose money automatically and instead can both gain and lose money.

With fiat money you're playing a rigged game.  With Bitcoin, you're not.  If a larger amount of people started holding Bitcoin then, like gold, its dependence on fiat decreases as the amount of people that hold it stabilises.  Gold isn't given value by the existence of the metal, it's given value by the fact that the asset is scarce.  

Equally, people buy special edition gaming devices and toys for extremely high prices, not because the materials are expensive but because they were told that's the price and they followed along with it because they can't just make their own.

Bitcoin is also quite hard to hack.  I could equally break into a safe holding some gold, and that would be a "hack" in the physical world.



Most things related to Bitcoin are comparable to assets that exist in "real life".  To argue that a digital asset has no intrinsic value is meaningless - its value is kept by the tech combined with scarcity, just like how a stock's value is kept by the company.

But this doesn't actually prove anything.

If this guy was against SegWit in secret, he could just spend the coins and then everyone else would laugh at him and support different scaling solutions.  It basically could be a giant conspiracy for all we know - if the coins actually get spent it wouldn't prove whether SegWit security works.

They're not.

Bittrex is a much better exchange than Poloniex - decent trading volume, running for longer, more coins, etc.

Poloniex's activity is extremely suspicious - slow withdrawals; downtime only when a coin pumps; "DDoS attacks" which don't let us trade but do make the coin get dumped in the middle of it, and more.

I hate this kind of reasoning.  If every single person refused to sell at a loss, there would be no trading because the buyers would never match the sellers.  It's just the basics of how an exchange works.  For trading there have to be losers as winners and no group can unanimously do the same thing when everyone is only there to get profit.

...

Moving on.

It wouldn't be a pump and dump to buy a coin and then sell it again at a higher price.  That would just be earning profit from trading.  If you misunderstand these basic terms, you might be one of the people the whales exploit in their pump and dumps to earn profit.

 

Do people really not back up their files regularly?

I would assume that a huge part of the reason the thieves aren't getting as much money as we'd expect is because most people back up their files at least every month or so.  Institutions should back up their files much more regularly than that.

Unless there's very significant new sensitive information that needs decrypting, there's not much reason for people to pay such a big ransom.  If it was $20 instead, I would probably pay it anyway, but there's really no point.

True.  They're demanding Bitcoin from everyone, and the vast majority of people being forced to pay in Bitcoin will never have owned Bitcoin before which is why the ransom is in a fixed USD amount.  The Bitcoin price is irrelevant to the amount that they're going to receive from anyone.

Fortunately, the news that I've seen in the mainstream (non-Bitcoin) media has only fleetingly mentioned that the ransom was paid in Bitcoin.  For example, one said:


This was the only mention of Bitcoin in the article.

Possibly.  Even if it drops though, I'm thinking it's easily strong enough to bottom out over $1500.

Looking at it in perspective, a little drop won't matter, especially since alts seem to have reached their peak and Bitcoin is stronger than ever in the past month.

It's very easy.  When you press the send button in your wallet and you're given the option to put in an address, press "advanced send" on the bottom left.  At the bottom there is the transaction fee that they set and you can change it to whatever you like.  So if it's 0.0005 for example, you'd just change it to 0.0006 or something.  A small difference can change a lot - you'll notice on the recommended fees page that so many people send transactions with 120 satoshi/byte fees that just getting from 121-150 will cut the transaction time to well under a day.

Careful with Ripple.  The vast majority of the market cap comes from the fact that the developers own about 30 million out of 38 million Ripple, and that it's thinly traded.  It could well go further but Ripple is centralised - also, Ripple isn't only going to be spent solely as the actual token but as others which represent different values.  Ripple is more like a speculative "stock" than a currency itself.

It has price potential but it's risky, just keep it within what you can afford to lose.

The price is over $150 over when you made this thread.  Of course you wait for a tiny little correction which happens all the time in anything that's appreciating in value, then try to pass it off as a crash, because you can only ever focus on the negatives.  It's too late and maybe you should look at the many times you've been wrong recently before now.  Get humble.

That is indeed how a Ponzi scheme works.  Fortunately though, the OP has responded to my PM.  Seems he's busy with his family and has a lot going on right now.

Anyway, he's still somewhat active but he says he's out at a restaurant and doesn't have the time to update the spreadsheet.  Not the sort of thing someone who was running off would say, so I'm reassured.

I don't think you understand what an "offline wallet" means.  It doesn't mean that you don't need the Internet to send transactions - how do you think miners and nodes would find your transactions?

The difference is that an online wallet's "online" element is that in order to access your Bitcoin, you have to be connected to another person or organisation to spend your Bitcoin for you, instead of spending it yourself like in an "offline" wallet.

Therefore, an online wallet is only secure if:

-The organisation is heavily government regulated

-The organisation is public enough that it's difficult for them to run off

-It's extremely difficult for them to get hacked, because they hold most of their Bitcoin in cold storage

In most cases, it's not possible to verify that these conditions are all met, and it also contributes to centralisation to be giving a large company responsibility for your Bitcoin.  Therefore personal offline wallets are always the safest and best.

There should be a stickied topic explaining why Ponzi schemes are so common in this subforum and what they entail for people who "invest" in them and for the admins (bad things).  Otherwise all we get is 100 people on every thread saying "hey, look at me, Ponzi schemes are bad and I have an ad in my signature", when this information should just be clearly stated once instead of scattered around over and over again.  If anyone "invests" in them with all the information at their disposal, they're an idiot.

It will absolutely never be "out of reach", no matter how high it goes.  That's a complete logical fallacy.  The only case in which it'll be "out of reach" is if the transaction fees are higher than the amount a person buys, which is very unlikely to ever happen.

It's just like saying "I will buy an ounce of gold, but if an ounce of gold's price goes up I won't be able to afford gold anymore".  No, you just buy a tiny bit less gold.  It's only about whether the price will go up further again in the future.

Depends how convenient Bitcoin is for real transactions.  If it ends up being a "settlement layer", I will probably convert gradually to spend for items that can't be bought with Bitcoins, and if it's too bad I might just convert the money I need into fiat while keeping most Bitcoin as a safe haven asset.  It's good to look at Bitcoin relative to USD because then you can judge how much it's grown over a certain period of time and it's clearer how much it's worth until it stabilises.

So as for USD, I would say that 1 million dollars looks super nice at first but let's break it down.  If you live fifty years after you have that much, you're left with just 20,000 dollars per year, which becomes worth less and less and time goes on unless you hold most in Bitcoin and protect yourself against fiat inflation.  If you invest and you manage to make 5% per year for example, you're talking about 50,000 dollars per year but you're subject to more risk.  In either case, you're not living the luxurious lifestyle that a million dollars brings to mind.

Therefore for practical purposes, ~10 million is rich.  It's surprising to see how easily people can throw away what seems like a lot of money if they have a lifetime to spend it.