No one's talking about surviving solely on Bitcoin, that's very near impossible anywhere.  You'd be lucky if you could get a coffee for it, not to mention how crazily expensive it would be to buy with the fee being more than a quarter of the price most of the time.

Surviving on Bitcoin would require loads of people to accept it - your landlord for rent (somewhat practical); the petrol station (less practical); supermarkets (less practical again); and casual shops, coffee shops and places like that (completely impractical).  Unfortunately shops are going backwards in terms of how practical it is to spend Bitcoin there - coffee shops sometimes accept it for no reason.

You'd still be lucky to buy anything with Bitcoin.  In reality there aren't very many merchants at all and those that do accept it don't know enough about it.  Some would even treat it as a gimmick, which for transactions like the ones they accept with it it is.

Articles like this don't help Bitcoin's adoption.  Reality does.

OKCoin has been having some serious withdrawal problems for a while.  It's not as bad as Bitfinex, but it's pretty bad.  They don't want to allow withdrawals until authorities actually pass reasonable laws that give them the opportunity to go forward.  Sorry, but you might not get your coins out for a while.

Various reviews are being conducted by the Central Bank of China as well.  Sit tight.

Still waiting for my TREZOR.  I'm hoping it'll be an endgame solution for my coins.  Blockchain has been pretty bad for me with the terrible fee estimation and bugs, but I just don't trust Coinbase or other online wallets to keep my funds secure and continue letting me have them and software wallets seem like a hassle to back up and pretty bad if you lose them or get a virus.

It really should be so much easier than this.

Any commodity can be given from one person to another.  I could give you a block of gold and it would still have been transferred from one person to another, even if it's pretty inefficient.  Signature campaigns are more of an anonymity thing - people don't want to give credit card details or something to random online companies.  Bitcoin is ideal for the purpose, even though the fees are pretty high for those microtransactions. 

It's pretty surprising that it's so damn easy to hack all these exchanges.

Why do they always hold so much money in hot wallets?  It's stupid! They only need to hold as much money in hot wallets as they need for the day's transactions.  Multisig transactions are clearly still insecure if they've been hacked so many times.

This isn't even the worst instance of hacking and it's only bad because it's on a smaller exchange.

You sent nearly two and a half thousand dollars in Bitcoin without using a normal fee?!

Nearly any wallet will tell you vaguely what fees to set.  You needed to set a fee of at least 100 satoshi per byte, and if you actually wanted it to confirm, between 200 and 300 satoshi.  That transaction is going to sit in the mempool for ages, and it'll probably get back to you eventually instead of confirming at all.

Putting aside how terrible everything in the world would be considering that most of our energy comes from non-renewable sources, mining would continue to be almost equally profitable to now.

The difficulty naturally adjusts to make mining barely profitable - if it's unprofitable, the number of miners decreases and the difficulty adjusts to make it profitable again.  Therefore, if electricity were free, far more miners and far more computing power would be dedicated to the network for essentially no reason and it would be a giant vacuum for machinery all over the world (as it already is, simply because of how limitless the current PoW system is), which would eventually even out and only rise along with Moore's Law.

There's really no point trying to pay less, it just means that the transaction will stay in the mempool for way too long.

It's pretty stupid to create a scam accusation because Coinbase decided to set fees.  They're only a scam if they take the funds in your wallet (which they have before to some people, but only if you're doing something illegal or against their ToS).

The network requires fees.  I usually pay much higher fees than that so consider yourself lucky.

The problem is everyone thinking that they're above the idea of respect.  No one could really respect Jihan Wu or Roger Ver, but soundbites on a thread about unification (this thread) are really pointless, and we've got at least two already.  Whenever someone decides to throw in the towel, the fighters just keep beating each other up.

A bubble doesn't have to be a thousand dollars and completely insane investors throwing all of their money in before it falls back down, it can be any significant meaningless change in the price.  Healthy growth has to have a reason, otherwise it's a bubble - can you actually explain, with words, why the price has gone up 100 dollars?

The price on Bitfinex doesn't show a bubble.  That's a completely irrelevant price because of their banking troubles.

There is pretty much a bubble right now, because no fundamentals have changed which would warrant such a dramatic price rise.  The price spreads don't matter to this except that there would be a huge decrease in investor confidence for Bitcoin if Bitfinex were to stop processing Bitcoin withdrawals/collapse in general.

At the time, there was a huge amount of publicity about Mt Gox.  Even if the general public will only have dim brand awareness, we're not realistically talking about the general public taking part - most newbies will have some vague ties to Bitcoin or interest in it beforehand or often at least be part of some sort of demographic (torrenters, gamers, that sort of thing) which will definitely have strong enough brand awareness of Mt Gox to be afraid of them.

If they came back up, the media would have a field day of clickbait articles about how terrible Mt Gox was (rightly so) and that would take investor confidence to a sum total of about zero.

Having a fixed supply just means that the value of the coin is determined by how much people need to hold, and all transactions are just in between two people.

Unfortunately you couldn't actually measure the coin against another currency, because nothing is stable enough to judge the value of it.  If you put it against the US dollar you'll find that it has a 1-2% deflation rate, when in fact it doesn't.

It certainly doesn't have a "deflationary bias" though.  I see that as a misconception.  If you found something with a stable value to compare it against, it would naturally be neutral and its value is only determined by the state of the economy and how much money people put into it.

Referral links are usually discouraged because they can encourage spammy posts which are only there to get referrals.

The closest you can get is Investor-Based Games, which is mainly for Ponzis, matrix schemes and other bullshit investments but revshares could be okay there.  You could also post on Services if you're providing or asking for one.

If you post a dodgy service or you don't offer a clean link too or in loads of other situations, while you won't be censored, you will probably get negative trust.  I'd tread lightly if I were you.

No one can tell if it's a Ponzi, it's impossible to verify his activity but it seems unlikely that it is.  Anyone, even trustworthy members, can do exit scams at any time and this is a pretty crazy investment, but for now it's looking legit.

Just received my second payment.  Thanks OP.  I'll start re-investing when I've got back my principal.

The problem is that any failure in decentralisation (from any part of Bitcoin) leaves it open to control from third parties because it's easier to talk to the people that have power.

For example, we know that miners can cause changes in the protocol - what would happen if governments could just tell a few public individuals to comply or they'll put them in prison?

That statistic is somewhat outdated.  Overall, the amount of BU nodes is a bit more like 10%.  Miners also do determine whether a solution happens - this just means that forking off will result in a huge price crash for BU's chain.

You still have a point though.  The amount of businesses that are ready for BU will be extremely low because for them it represents uncertainty and unnecessary change. 

Well once it happens, especially if it's BU, I would sell straight away.  That civil war would get a hundred times worse, with attacks as well potentially, if something actually happens.  I'd buy back in a couple of days after, but it could be really bad the instant it happens (especially with a split).

Actually I would say it's alright to receive the payments directly to the exchange.  It's just preventing the extra step of taking it out into your wallet and then depositing it into Poloniex which is inconvenient for you.

Be careful if you're dealing with large amounts of funds though.  I would never trust someone completely to do transactions for you.

Well, yes and no.

I wouldn't phrase it as "winning" because that implies that it's going to succeed economically, which it might not.  As much as some people like to claim that it wouldn't result in a split, the chance of a low-consensus hard fork like it would have resulting in a split is pretty close to 100%.

The older coin could "win", in the sense of having a higher price, at any time.