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.

Despite you seemingly not realising that rectification is supposed to be sorting something out rather than messing it up, I somewhat agree with you.

I wouldn't really pin this on the Chinese government too much though, more governments in general.  In the current system increased Bitcoin awareness is going to be bad for governments as it can be a good way to launder money and in some cases illegal activity, fraud, or tax evasion.  I'm surprised America haven't gone much further yet, but who knows what they're doing behind the scenes.

My point is that every time openly talks about how terrible someone else's solution is, they ignore their own.  There are flaws in all of them and they all lead to some kind of centralisation.  That's the light people should be viewing this in.
The amount of transactions on the network has been steadily rising for a long time.  If transactions are more convenient, the transaction volume will rise faster.  If it's on the LN it won't result in it being harder to run full nodes, but the LN's transactions themselves are centralised.

After having a look at how desperate everyone is for each viewpoint to go through, I've concluded that in all situations they're arguing for a type of centralisation and against another type of centralisation.

BU's increased amount of data on the blockchain means that running full nodes would become impractical for ordinary users as the amount of Bitcoin transactions would increase much faster than how much data Bitcoin users are willing to download to run a full node.

The Lightning Network (a potential development of SegWit) would result in transactions being done largely offchain and essentially centralised into huge transactions.

Staying as we are now without scaling would result in the centralisation of users because it won't be practical for people to spend any small transactions on the Bitcoin network, therefore making the users have to be wealthier.

Switching to Ethereum would equate to acceptance of a centralised development team without a real immutable/high-consensus based network and would also mean that the supply of new money can be controlled, removing Bitcoin's scarcity.

What's your favourite kind of centralisation?

The difference is that there's no huge hype that's causing the price to spike.  Looks like this time gold parity might stick for longer than a day or two.

I'm not sure people want to see some random website hacked which hasn't (provably) done anything wrong.  Clearly you're an idiot, since gambling isn't inherently a scam (they admit to having a house edge, if you lose money thinking you'll win long-term you're an idiot, maybe you're just annoyed about losing?)


Even more stupid though were them for giving up their account for 0.3 Bitcoin.  I wonder how they'll handle the signature campaign now.

UASF is a User Activated Soft Fork.  Basically, it's a mandatory activation.  Therefore it could happen without 95% hashrate actually supporting SegWit (which realistically will never happen).

It is actually quite surprising how much traffic some faucet sites get.  Freebitco.in has an alexa rating of 1,743 - shockingly high, really.

Most of their traffic will be coming from poorer countries where the winnings from the faucet do actually mean something and aren't just pure dust - alexa says that 10.2% of traffic is from India, 8.4% from Russia, 8% from Brazil, 4.8% from Iran and 4.1% from Venezuela.  

Anyway, running faucets is expensive and difficult - Freebitco.in for example are clearly pretty desperate for money, which is why they have dice games, talk about the opportunity to win a jackpot all the time and have long-term savings accounts.  It's really not worth it.

I'm sure that was Bitfinex's tactic for avoiding paying the full amount.  They would never have actually been able to pay it out so they just release a token which no one expects them to repay anyway.

These are not the actions of a reputable service.

It's not relevant at all who starts the campaign, it's only relevant who joins it because they're responsible for the absolute cesspool of spam that completely dominates entire boards on the forum.

If people's only aim is to earn money they're doing it wrong.

This is a new low for the forum.  People literally paying someone else to make posts for them just to spread their signature all over the forum, it's really pathetic.  In fact, the whole culture of "post quality" in signature campaigns is pretty bad.  What matters is the authenticity of the posts and that people are actually posting them out of interest in the topic or willingness to help people instead of to grab some extra money.

Spot on.  Even if the devs are corrupt, they're not naturally/inherently that way.  Miners have a profit motive, so voting from miners is solely based around who has the most money to throw around for Bitcoin.

Core has been consistent enough not to cause a giant crash in the number of nodes being ran.  Anyone committed enough to run a full node will have an understanding that alternative implementations exist, and yet most of them don't choose BU or other nodes, simply because Core comparatively know what they're doing. 

BU's status as a kind of miner uprising is terrible.  It's basically just miners hoping to increase the transaction capacity directly for profit who are terrified of offchain transactions to make microtransactions convenient or other solutions to actual problems in the protocol.

I'm thinking that they're just monitoring this forum so that anyone who posts about them being a scam gets their money.  Genesis Mining are a pretty evil company even if they don't directly scam their users.

Did you really get ROI though?  Most of the posts I've seen about Genesis Mining (especially on Scam Accusations) are just saying that it's impossible to ROI with them any more, so they're just legitimately stealing your money and then keeping the machines after two years.

That's very dodgy.

Looks like you're just running a really low-quality matrix scheme which doesn't even have https support and trying to pass it off as a legitimate service for introducing newbies to Bitcoin.  People have to fail for others to succeed.  It's just simple maths.

With altcoin trading, it's all about whether they're copying another coin.

There are lots of altcoins with the Scrypt mining algorithm that just copy other Scrypt coins and have very few differences but advertise themselves with the properties that these coins already have.  There are also lots of Bitcoin SHA-256 copycats today even when it's pretty old technology now.

The important thing is that the altcoin has a real market - you just need to find the coins which have some difference which helps them to be potentially useful - Monero for example is very good at anonymising transactions which is why its price has been growing in a quite stable way for a while.

If they are copying another coin, you should only trade it with Bitcoin if it's very new or in ICO and you think there's going to be a bit of a pump at the start.

Great idea.  The most important reason why you would have a blockchain based charity is transparency.

With fiat charities, it's so much harder to follow the money.  With a blockchain, you have the choice to independently verify everything - that the charity owns the address that you're sending to, that different people own the addresses that the charity is sending to (and if the charity puts work on it it's much easier to prove without doubt exactly who you're sending to and why).

It would also take away people's excuses not to donate to charity, related to how little they actually spend on the causes (although personally I think the charities are often investing it in advertising and general investments so that the cause gets more money in the long term).

Actually it would cause a price drop.  If Bitfinex went bankrupt people wouldn't be withdrawing anymore from the exchange because the exchange wouldn't let them anymore, so the amount that will be withdrawn from the exchange is pretty close to what has already been withdrawn based on what people currently believe about the future of Bitfinex.  So there will be some withdrawals before they go bankrupt, but not loads.

What has to outweigh the amount of withdrawals from Bitfinex to other exchanges is the amount of money that isn't put into Bitcoin because of fear of the exchanges scamming people.  It's safe to say that when Mt. Gox has already collapsed and Cryptsy has collapsed and yet another Bitcoin exchange is about to collapse that people will be increasingly scared of buying Bitcoin with fiat deposits into an exchange - that will stunt the price growth.

If USDT fails along with Bitfinex as well it'll only make it worse and could cause panic selloffs for a little while.  It won't be as extreme as people think but it'll be something.

I think he's got a point actually.  You're right that Bitcoin has the biggest community and market dominance, but that's not relevant to whether an altcoin is a good investment.  People use Monero because it's better than Bitcoin for illegal activity and anonymity.  People use Ethereum because it's better than Bitcoin for app development.  These altcoins all serve the same purposes as Bitcoin to some extent but with their own additions for different niches.

Even if it was a scamcoin or shitcoin it would still be an investment, just a bad one.

Paper wallets are probably better than TREZOR for ultra long-term HODLing, even though TREZOR is about as safe as you can get holding it digitally.

If you laminate it and store it somewhere safe (say I buried it in my garden inside a safe, for example) it basically couldn't get any safer than that since it's immune to cyber attacks.  You could even have a second paper wallet stored in a different place and then you'd be safe against a 5-dollar-wrench attack (just tell them where that one was containing only a small amount of Bitcoin).

TREZORs are very secure but their main purpose isn't to be safer than a paper wallet, it's to be better for everyday transactions than a paper wallet while still being secure.

What you said very strongly implies that you think SegWit is the only viable possible solution though, because you believe that changing the transaction capacity through block size isn't actually scaling the network and the network needs to be scaled.

So you implied that you think SegWit is the only major solution given which would actually scale the network (and therefore that you support it, unless you find some completely irrelevant solution that none of us have heard of).

This is so weird.  Maybe you didn't read what I said or what anyone else said?

This forum isn't for Ponzi schemes.  It doesn't matter whether they're paying or not - they were always intended to be scams. Everyone knows perfectly well that these schemes stop paying after a while.

Take it to Investor-Based Games or don't post it at all.