No one said what they have to do.  Actually, very few companies are obliged to provide the kind of customer service that they do, it's just that they have an economic incentive to provide the service - that no one will buy feeling insecure.

Bitmain is a weird exception since they have such a huge monopoly that there aren't enough good alternatives so they can get away with screwing everyone over.  No one should be buying from them by this point, they're a cancer to Bitcoin.

Retailers don't accept Litecoin or Ether either, and very few accept Bitcoin.  No cryptocurrency will have its price based on its utility, ever.  Their price is only based on the money that people hold in them, and utility is part of the reason why people hold money in it but they don't just put it in, spend it and be done with it.  People also don't only hold money in PayPal that they're spending that second.

And yes, it's daily price changes.

IMO you'll only have proven that you're getting the money legitimately when you're provably running the service at an overall loss (when you'd paid out more profits than you've received in deposits consistently).  HYIP admins run them for a long time sometimes but they still end up with a gain overall themselves.

I somewhat trust you right now, but I still view this as a high risk investment for now

Coinbase and Kraken have been having glitches, Bitfinex and OKCoin are screwed and even Bitstamp had a hack a while ago.  Exchanges in general are terrifying and the price is becoming questionable.

I've sent some more Bitcoin into this.

ID: https://blockchain.info/tx/dbb1cac58d14418f3e3df64590995e1e716f802586eb8af9cdcdfe197391d5c7

Thanks OP.

The West are never labeled invaders for providing financial aid.  They're only labeled invaders (correctly) for trying to intervene in civil wars which don't concern them.

The syntax of the sentence is terrible as well.  It implies that Satoshi Nakamoto is the subject and therefore that he is the "alleged" Bitcoin founder.

Craig Wright, however, obviously isn't as it's really not that hard to prove you're satoshi if you are.  Journalists reporting it don't care whether or not he's satoshi as long as they can drag a good story out of it.  Craig Wright is a lunatic and if he's involved in it you can be pretty confident it's a bad idea.

I don't think you know what he's discussing.  He means the rates for the site LocalBitcoins.com, which is a peer-to-peer exchange.

The reason is very simple OP:  it's much harder for people to work with LocalBitcoins than to work on exchanges.  The premium is just the value of going outside to somewhere where another person meets you and manually waiting there for the transfer, along with the difficulty of selling and buying at times which are potentially inconvenient for you because it can take a long time to find a partner and the very high possibility of someone scamming you.

You're very, very wrong.

Think of a bank for a second.  When you put money in the bank, you don't own it, the bank does and they spend it for you.  The reason that your money is usually OK in a bank is because governments tend to insure reasonable amounts of money in the bank so that you can be compensated if they fail to pay and they're also very heavily regulated.

Now imagine that you were putting money into a bank that has only existed for about five years, is dealing with a new type of money, isn't insured and is extremely poorly regulated.  That's what an online wallet does.  It's about the furthest thing from safe that could exist in your lifetime.  It's basically like an exchange where you don't have to withdraw fiat.  They could collapse just like Mt Gox did and your money would be gone.

When you hold your money outside of an online wallet, you have responsibility for your funds because you actually control them.  If you lose them, that's your own fault, so it has the potential to be extremely secure.  You could run a full node; you could own a hardware wallet; you could write down the keys as a paper wallet if you don't intend to spend very often; you could even just store it in a lightweight node like Electrum.

Bitcoin offers real freedom from banks.  The whole point is that you don't have to trust a third party to have full control over your funds.  When you put your money in an online wallet, you remove that function of Bitcoin and thus it makes very little sense for you to be involved in Bitcoin at all.

Looks like a pretty arbitrary chart, you'd have to reasonably explain the parameters for me to believe it.  When the price goes higher it gets harder to increase, so it can't be as simple as a line.  Most people, even professionals, aren't estimating anywhere over about 10k.

Humans aren't like animals.  The individuality makes us humans, otherwise we would be sheep (I don't know why sheep get such a bad rep but we would be).

Swarm intelligence is a bad idea.  Even if it would make us more intelligent we would lose individuality which in my view is more important.  It could only be good if it was a proper peer-to-peer collective of individual minds, like Bitcoin pretty much is.

It's still a proper ATH.  Those things cause their own prices, but on the real, working exchanges there's an ATH so that's good enough for me.  Especially since the growth has actually happened over a few weeks instead of a few days, which is always a good sign for the future.

An increased block size would not prevent centralisation.  It's a way of fitting more "decentralised" on-chain transactions, but as mining centralisation happens it won't matter that transaction are onchain.

Nodes would be centralised as well - more transactions means a bigger blockchain, which in turn means it's more expensive to run nodes and they become centralised.

It's impossible to avoid at least one kind of centralisation happening.

When a transaction is over 100MB, it's treated as an abnormal transaction by nodes and will be very difficult to pass through.  However, no transaction is that size - the median transaction size is somewhere around 250 bytes and it would be very unusual to have a transaction larger than a megabyte.

Transaction limits are just the block size which reasonably can't be fiddled with unless there's a consensus with miners.

I get your point, but I suppose my phrasing was just poor rather than my point being wrong.

People on there arguing viciously are very, very rarely changing their opinions, so the chance of their discussions actually resulting in a change of sentiment for the economic majority is unlikely (except for newbies who contribute to a side).  Furthermore, the amount of actually money being behind the people talking on there isn't going to be even close to the majority and a lot of whales won't be on there.

People have broadly been in favour of Core (and to a lesser extent SegWit) for a while but it hasn't influenced the miners yet.  It's alright though, if they fork then the split coin will just fail.

She doesn't seem to get it.  If your only aim is quick profits you're looking at everything so wrong, and she'll be one of those newbies who loses shitloads of money because she puts in too much money later (it'd be her fault for not thinking before going mental).

She even says that Coinbase is the best wallet, but says that the "fees are really high" so clearly she doesn't even get how Bitcoin transaction fees work, what an online wallet is or really what the point of cryptocurrencies is at all.

Oh well.  People aren't stupid.  She'll learn with time and experience.  Some people have to learn the hard way.

In normal investments, you'd be pretty lucky to get ROI in five years, if that.  Bitcoin investments are unique because they're less professional and people can screw around with them a lot more and potentially get a lot more even though the risk/reward ratio is hard to judge.

Still, I don't think cloud mining is a good idea.  The difficulty, over time, will naturally adjust to only just be profitable and that'll mean that it's only profitable if you do it yourself or the cost of giving the profit to the cloud mining service will result in a loss.  After a few years, most people will give up on cloud mining altogether except for crap Ponzi schemes which inevitably collapse.

Genesis mining is even worse since you only have two years of the extremely low chance for you to get ROI.  The recent rise in the Litecoin price just means that it's more profitable because the difficulty hasn't adjusted yet, but for most of the contract the profits will be much lower and in reality you still won't ever ROI.

There's really no point sending dust since it'll just raise someone else's transaction fees more than the amount they receive.  For your purposes, the Blockchain wallet won't have any minimum amount to send. 

I'm sure you'll do well if you're talking >10k satoshi.  I've never had a problem with sending personally.

Yes, but it's not the only one.  Gold, other precious metals and other cryptocurrencies also claim to be stores of value / hedges against debt based economies and regardless of how good they actually are, people are likely to invest in them.  The only way that Bitcoin can become stable is with enough people investing for it to have decent liquidity, and there's a little bump to go over before it's reached that point.

A good thing about Bitcoin isn't privacy but variation of privacy, so you have a point.  If I verify my identity with someone and then, from that verified service, sign a message with a Bitcoin address, I could prove exactly what other companies I deal with, what transactions I do and all of those companies can be public entities because they associate themselves with the pseudonyms which are already publicly available on the blockchain.

It's a similar reason to why some people are interested in the concept of blockchain-based charities - accountability.