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.

Sent 0.105 more Bitcoin. 

ID:  d54d839a30134299a20a1b9798d1453d764394c15f404b482361b831e6a64e85

Misleading as hell.  He claims that Bitcoin is "issued by unidentified actors".  Clearly he doesn't understand the process of mining at all or that the supply is fixed.

With fiat, inflation is cumulative which means that the purchasing power from holding fiat goes down more and more the longer you hold it.  While you could imagine the straight line of 2% inflation, the reality is that 2% inflation is 2% on top of the last year's inflation, and the year before that, and the year before that.  Holding money for 50 years would make it pretty close to worthless.

By nature Bitcoin is safer than fiat.  The only warning would be that's it's not stable yet, but if people put their money into it then it naturally becomes stable.  That's why the system is more secure.

China doesn't really dominate Bitcoin.  Mining is somewhat centralised from a few Chinese mining pools, however Chinese dominance wouldn't be a problem if the pools were diverse and independent from each other - it's not about the country, it's about the people and just how much power they have.

You're on the right direction for day trading maybe, but altcoins have much more wild fluctuations than that and when you lose, you'll lose big.  The most successful traders will buy in when people think that altcoins are dying and sell when people think they're going to take over Bitcoin.  It's all about other people's sentiment and your own - sometimes you have to ignore it and do the opposite because what you feel is exactly what whales who make big money from it want you to feel.

No, not yet.

If you look at the Google search trends, which are one of the best indicators we have of hype right now, you'll realise that actually the interest in Bitcoin was dramatically higher in 2013 than today (at least 50% more and nearly double in some parts).  

What that probably means is that institutional investors are getting involved as well as people with high amounts of savings.  Possibly that could mean that they expect the price to go up a lot more, which is a good sign.  It could also mean that this is a bubble, but that seems unlikely since there are reasons for rising adoption in various countries.

Cut it out you two, there were another two accounts you made a week ago to shill for this extremely shady "service" of yours.  We get it, you don't know how to make a website.

(Note: domain registered less than a month ago and expires after a year).

It's already popping - all of the 20 top altcoins' prices have dropped in the past 24 hours except Waves, including ETH and Ripple.  It's either a bubble popping or just them reaching their peak.  Either way I'm happy.