To be escrow you need to be reputable member of the community. Reputation is the key here, you will have to earn it over time.
If you are newbie, junior member or full member and you didn't interact or participate in any trades before, it is more than sure no one will use you as escrow.
The problem is, that because of account selling is rampant there is no way to determine who is who anymore. (Look up: master-p exit scam)

Unless we will come up with bitcoin powered trading platform offering buyer&seller protection until then Bitcoin will be always a second choice.
Customers will simply chose simplicity of a PayPal/Credit Card, some centralized platform which accepted Bitcoin in the past are now no longer continuing to support it.
Humble Bundle comes to mind, you can even use Amazon Payments to buy it, but not Bitcoin, not anymore.

After the event is over and we know the outcome of the game we are always wise and eager to make claims that this bet was *obvious*.
But would you really bet on underdog against La La Land? It is similar situation to what we seen during US presidential elections.
I liked Trump more but still refused to believe he had a chance - and in the end he won...

For now I am glad I forgot to bet on Oscars, because I would lost my money - La La Land was my pick too...

Not all ICOs are scams or bad projects. We had some good ICOs in the past.

Many people at this point start to forget that development of Ethereum was funded by an online crowdsale in 2014 as well.

Back in that day ICOs were better. Today market is so saturated that is is hard to find really valuable ICO.

There is no formula behind altcoin popularity. Even the biggest altcoin can fall from grace.
Litecoin was once the biggest altcoin then Ethereum and Dash appeared and dethroned it.

There is no way to determine if project is reliable and good unless you have every piece of information:
- who is backing the coin, who develops it, are developers trustworthy individuals skilled with their craft?
- what is the purpose of the altcoin, is it unique and new concept?
- what is the roadmap and goals? are they achievable or coin will be forever in alpha stage...

It is unwise to think that any centralized service or website is free from being pawn in the bigger game.
In the end it is government which controls everything. Do you remember when BFL went down?
Theymos was 'asked' by the authorities to share private messages of everyone involved in this case.
He complied to that request. How could he refuse?

Blockchain technology has multiple applications. We are still finding new ways to fully utilize this tech.
We can use blockchain to improve and enhance fiat currency exchange, boost remittance, p2p internet transfers, asset and ownership registration etc.
It basically can be used everywhere where database is needed, or you are collecting data and need to be sure about its immutability.

I understand your point of view and support it, but realistically speaking, if you were mining BTC would you reduce the fees?
Miners know that they are monopolizing the market and there is no competition so they chose to exploit that fact and get rich here and now.
Their line of thought is probably something like this: "Why wait for the unknown future, China might ban BTC or worse. We can earn money today!"
Do you think Chinese bitcoin miners care about ideals and future?

Bitcoin is banned or restricted only in totalitarian countries which are protective over their shaky economy and can't handle bitcoin.
They try to fight it but it is futile, you can fight progress. Do we really care if bitcoin is banned in some 3rd world countries, or for instance in Ecuador?
After all it's the country which uses foreign currency (USD) because their economy is unfit to distribute their own FIAT.

If you want to test out vDice then exactly do you need bitcoin for? vDice is exclusively Ethereum platform implemented as Ethereum Smart Contract.
AFAIK You play with Ehtereum only, so no bitcoin can be used.

This news is more than half year old. Do we have any following information? It seems that either this project died, or didn't developed at all.

There is small problem with local project like these, even when they are really amazing and progressive not enough people noticed it.

What is really important is Switzerland's stance on bitcoin, they are embracing it! Zug region is called cryptovalley, bitcoin ATM everywhere and Bitcoin friendly banking industry.

Decentralized services might work, to certain degree. Decentralization is not some magic keyword which will automatically make everything better.
vDice is decentralized gambling platform, but their decentralization is just based on using various other services to verify their authenticity.
For example - random.org - is used to generate perfect random outcome of the bet. But what will happen in a case when random.org would turn out to be badly coded?

It is because better tech can't kill bitcoin. The only thing that really matter is initial distribution of coin. Do you think that new altcoin even with great technical specs could have that?
With dubious background or shady developing team no altcoin can be good. Heck, we have coins developed by really great people but they can't manage to distribute coin in a perfect way.
Prime example is Zcash -  technical aspects of that coin are not important if you need to pay 20% tax from every mined coin to support early investors/share holders.

ICO hating trend seems to be rising recently. But tell me, if people are so tired and annoyed by ICO then why we are still having ICO?
Altcoin investors are voting with their money, their greed is fueling the ICO projects.
They need to stop backing every new ICO just to earn quick buck, so ICO will stop appearing eventually, it is as simple as that.

CloudFlare is used by millions of websites even 0,00003% leak is HUGE.

The more complicated the defense the higher chance there will be a backdoor somewhere. It is exactly what happened with CloudFlare.
There is really no telling if hackers managed to find that exploit before Travis Ormandy shared the info about it.

Bitcointalk was hacked before and sensitive data was leaked, in cases like that 2FA is not helping at all.

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We know that Cloudflare issue caused a leak of approximately 0,00003% personal data but I wonder what that number really means.
I.e. what is the actual number of compromised accounts and how many passwords leaked: 1000 or 10000?

But that is the point for many people! The are willing to take the risk and invest in the early development to grab the biggest share.
They know that ICO at the later stage won't be as hyped and the initial pump is probably the biggest and fastest way to profit.
This is the problem as we had influx of bad developers who tarnished concept of ICO and altcoin scene with their semi-legit projects.

The bigger the market cap the harder it is to influence it by single whale, but it is not impossible.
We know that there are old early adopters who own around 1% of all coins, it should be still easy for them to cause disturbance if they wanted.
There is more than certain - if Roger Ver or Winklevoss twins would dump their coins price of BTC would crash.
Plus, we have many more unknown bitcoin whales that are not eager to publicly flaunt their prosperity.

Great news, what is more amazing is that we did it without Chinese exchanges leading the way!

Now we can wait until bitcoin will break that 'fake' ATH ever listed on an exchange - IIRC it was $1242 on MtGox.
We can argue that at that time MtGox was dying and insolvent and no one ever sold bitcoin during that spike, but it still remains top price of all time.

Well, that is for most part correct assumption.

Usually casino promotions are tailored to be only bait, if you read ToS thoroughly, all of a sudden realization will struck you, that withdrawing bonus money is near impossible.
Not to mention that you are limited to certain games, can't participate in lucky hours or some other ridiculous rules. So no, better to play with your own money and win fair and square.

Sometimes there are really good straightforward promotions. But they are extremely rare to find.
The best promotion I ever seen - lottery during Euro 2016 on Sportsbet.io.