You can't really do practice accounts that are as good as real ones.  Your best bet is to just sign up to Poloniex and just put a couple of dollars worth of Bitcoin in at a time to trade with and you won't lose a lot experimenting.

If you want that tiny amount of Bitcoin I'm talking about, you could just claim from some faucets into a cache and then take it out directly into your Poloniex deposit after a while.

I don't know where they're a scam and you really shouldn't be posting scam accusations without any meaningful evidence, but in all cases with less reputable sites like this there's no point at all buying from here instead of official sites like BITMAIN.

The price on there is lower than the official Bitmain site, which is very suspicious.  It either means they're selling you second hand miners or they're a scam.

Yes.

Basically Poloniex has a great trading volume, keeps their coins updated and usually doesn't add any complete shitcoins, nice interface, margin trading, and loads more stuff.  Really their only problem is that sometimes it's laggy when there are big pumps.  That can hurt people big time occasionally and their servers should be a bit better, but basically they're the best altcoin exchange about.

Careful of USDT though, there's a storm abrewin'.

When people talk about "legalising" Bitcoin, they're looking at it wrong.  Despite the government's moderately aggressive stance on them, you can still buy and use Bitcoin in India.  So it would really be "legalising" it, it would just be "legitimising" it.

What you really want is for them to hand a big message to you on a silver platter saying that Bitcoin is definitely a currency and it's great and it's the future.

You're kind of right, Blockchain is still a web wallet and they still basically hold your coins for you but they give as much control as they could really manage while still being a web wallet.  For security features, they're the best.  However that doesn't mean that the security on their side is all that good, like with the Cloudbleed problem and several other major bugs and flaws with their wallet.  You'll never be completely safe on an online wallet, so you have to accept that Blockchain is basically just as close as you can get, without being good.

Beware of their fee estimation though.  It's terrible.

Have you got a source on this?  Pretty sure Bitstamp and BTC-E are still accepting deposits.  It's only OKCoin which has also blocked deposits, possibly because of some problems with the banks in their country.

Only OKCoin that I've seen.
The only time when that happens is if fiat withdrawals are not accepted.  If deposits aren't allowed, it's fine because people can still trade Bitcoin and fiat and withdraw either (people often still withdraw fiat) and there would be no artificially increased demand for people to withdraw fiat.

So the price on exchanges other than Bitfinex is legit and I think people are reasonably excluding Bitfinex from their price estimations.  Therefore overall the price is not being pumped by that and it wouldn't take quite such a dramatic dip if Bitfinex Goxed everyone.

Pretty sure there are way, way more scam copies of Bitmixer than that.  It's to an insane extent, there can even sometimes be google ads which advertise mirror sites with slightly different names.  Everyone just needs to check the link very carefully before they start doing a deposit into Bitmixer, or indeed any site.

That's interesting.  I guess it's reasonable for Poloniex to keep switching out altcoins that have low trading volume and aren't doing very well for newer ones.  I like that Poloniex has a pretty smooth interface and it's not covered in hundreds of different coins like some exchanges are.

It must be hard for them to get the word to everyone though.  If it's just one announcement and people don't get the message clearly enough, Poloniex will end up with thousands of coins that were practically stolen from users' accounts, unless they provide some kind of way to recover the coins after they get delisted.

Poloniex is covered in pump and dumps even with the more reputable coins.  It's good to clear out the trash every once in a while.

Yes, but that isn't really a milestone.  It'll only be a milestone when one specific solution gets over 50%.

Hashrate doesn't even reflect the will of the community.  It only reflects the will of a small group of people who control the majority of the hashrate.  Big block solutions having over 50% doesn't really mean anything.

More importantly, how popular a solution is already shouldn't affect people's opinions.  No one should be caving in to whichever solution is more popular or based on the belief that one is unlikely to happen.

These exchanges are slowly become useless.  Chinese, Taiwanese and similar countries' exchanges failing to process withdrawals is really something people are ignoring too much.  If it goes on for too long, it'll be completely clear that the Chinese government is getting more aggressive with its regulation (and maybe this time that they'll actually follow through).

I wouldn't compare OKCoin to Bitfinex though.  Bitfinex is clearly having trouble of its own - we might see people getting Goxed pretty soon.

Real "fair pumps" are terrible because you're just going to end up bidding against people who are more experienced than you and potentially being too late or setting the wrong price or something.  About half the time you're going to fail from doing this.

Unless you can cheat the system, participating in pump and dumps is a bad idea (and if you can, you're pretty shady yourself).

The only possibilities are "next month" or "never".  If it doesn't happen within about a month, I'll assume that it'll never happen and everyone should take their funds out.  To be safe, I think people who don't take their funds out are stupid, but it's okay because their loss will just help more intelligent people take their money out before it's (potentially) too late.  Suspended withdrawals and deposits - that's not a functional exchange because it means that Bitcoin can't be exchanged for fiat anymore.  With even fiat deposits blocked, it's very unlikely it'll be sorted with the banks.

Yes.  Stocks, investment trusts and pretty much everything else is based on the value of a company or something else which either has an idea or amount of business.  These things usually have intrinsic value from that idea or business, and if they didn't, the price would be in a bubble.

Stop using words that you think are clever in the wrong context.  You use "namely" in about 90% of your posts wrongly, I've seen you on all the sig spam threads.  Anyway, if you're talking about "anything which price is defined by something else" the answer is "anything with intrinsic value".

No, I'm saying that the reason Bitcoin isn't a bubble is because it can reasonably be considered an asset as well as a currency and that's part of its value.  The reason that it's an asset is because of scarcity - the same reason that gold has its value.

I've got my first payment.

Transaction ID: 716c21348ed885af022734c5f18b1b1b22f87ed531dbf65b8baee3bf0deb1

Thanks OP.

Good.  They shouldn't have loads of coins listed.  Poloniex have always been appropriately selective about what coins that they list on the exchange so that they don't end up being like YoBit and just listing every scamcoin that comes along for the hype of getting some trading volume.  It's nice that all the meaningless pump and dumps on Poloniex are at least with coins that have a reason to exist.

A bubble in economics is when the price of an asset differs dramatically from its intrinsic value.  In theory, Bitcoin's intrinsic value as a currency is defined by how much of its value is for people who are buying it and selling it in order to use it as a currency.  Bitcoin's price, in that sense, is in a giant bubble because most of its price is a speculative investment.

However, gold's price for example is also not currently defined by anything - it's just based on its use as an asset.  I could give someone a gold ingot in exchange for a resource, but it would be expensive to take it from one place to another, and the same applies to Bitcoin.  Gold's intrinsic value is also actually lower than its price, but that's because it is something that people would reasonably put money into to protect themselves from the risk of fiat currency.  This is what means that neither Bitcoin nor gold are in a bubble.

However, fiat currency is also not in a bubble for practical purposes because it's also the case that people might want to spend it but they also hold it, and wait for things to happen to it in the future, and sometimes trade it.  So basically, neither is necessarily in a bubble, and it's very difficult to tell if a large price rise is a bubble or just an increase in confidence.  The only case when any of these things could be in a bubble is when there's a very dramatic price rise with little reasonable explanation, such as Bitcoin at the end of 2013.

"Freedom for all" is just a term we basically use for Bitcoin's decentralised blockchain and the ability to have the responsibility for your own funds by storing your online funds yourself.  Ethereum, even though its development team and systems are pretty centralised, does offer the same thing but with the addition of features like smart contracts.  I don't think that a "currency" which is actually mainly for features like app development can really develop as a currency since that's not even the main reason for it to exist.

The site looks pretty scammy.  Unless you explain how exactly you would be able to buy Bitcoin using SMS without having to reveal much more personal information, I'm going to assume it's a scam since it looks like you're just hoping to get everyone's details.  Especially since you posted the support email and later pretended that the system wasn't yours.

Super high referral commission is pretty sketchy too.

Clearly this not at all a situation in which BU can just overtake SegWit straight away again.  BU is mainly supported by the same group of pools and it has been consistently been that way for a while.  F2Pool signalling SegWit means that the support will be consistently higher than BU, just like how stable BU has been for a while.

Seems you're a bit out of date or you haven't been paying attention either.  F2Pool said on their Twitter that they would be signalling SegWit due to their user feedback supporting it.  I'm not sure if they'll stick with it or whether they think SegWit will happen either, but I know that they are legitimately deciding to signal SegWit right now and while they do, SegWit will be in the lead.

So basically, you're wondering whether the price would go up if a giant global organisation unanimously decided to screw over their own respective countries by ditching their heavily regulated fiat currencies in favour of a currency which hasn't even existed for 10 years and is only practical for certain purposes.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but it's not happening.  And shockingly, the price would go up if it did.