Yeah it's all about your area unfortunately, if you live in an urban area you could go for LocalBitcoins which is a pretty trusted site for exchanging with cash (and PayPal etc sometimes, but be careful with that because scams are always possible and it's P2P).  If you don't, the first thing I would do is exchange with someone on the forum for PayPal (they might know your name but it's very unlikely they'll use the information), but if you use PayPal you need to choose a really good person because PayPal transactions are reversible and everyone will think you're trying to scam them.

A few credit card sites don't need your name, namely CoinMama for small amounts (under $150) and if you live in an urban area you could use a Bitcoin ATM, but them having your credit card details could make me pretty insecure as well.

I would avoid signing up to BTCery because cloud mining is seldom profitable and the chance that it's a Ponzi scheme is always going to be pretty high.

The only cloud mining service which definitely isn't a scam is HashNest because they're run by Bitmain.  I'm sure that there are several others but the vast majority are either blatant scams or have clever dirty tricks to avoid paying certain people.  Even HashNest probably isn't a good investment - cloud mining seldom could be.

Don't conflate pool mining with cloud mining.  By all means buy your own equipment and join a pool.  Even if they have cheaper running costs than you, you'll be a lot safer and probably earn more profit than cloud mining.  If you have expensive electricity or other major setbacks, it might even be a good idea to steer clear of mining altogether.

Oh come on, one Ponzi scheme can't pump the Bitcoin price.  Did it even occur to you that people are going to put their Bitcoin into the scheme when the price is as high as possible?  The scheme claims to have its own payment system I think (it's pretty hard to understand), but if true it'll mean that when putting Bitcoin in it'll be converted to something else, so in the same way that people want to sell their Bitcoin when the price is as high as possible, they'll put it into that Ponzi scheme when the price is high as well.

The two things are a correlation, not a causation.  Big difference.

No one will ever want to pay tax on digital currency assets.  I doubt that governments can't find every single person that owns Bitcoin and make them pay tax on it.

The good thing is that Coinbase is actually pretty much irrelevant.  They're getting one specific online wallet provider to give details about their users, so anyone who actually owns Bitcoin instead of holding it online shouldn't have any trouble.  Hopefully if Coinbase fail it'll give users an incentive to download a software wallet like Electrum or even a full node instead of paying the tax.

It's a much quicker and better way of sending transactions, so if you believe that BU is a better way of sending transactions can't we just treat that as a "voluntary side service" and use the original coin instead?  There's no legitimate situation in which people would just rather have a worse transaction for the sake of it.

Yes, some sites (and users) have been mentioned above.  But it's a terrible idea because PayPal is reversible.  The people giving you Bitcoin for it will never trust you to leave the transaction after you've received your Bitcoin because Bitcoin is non-reversible.  Because of that, sites will charge large fees out of fear of scammers and, for any significant amount, will require loads of ID to make sure you're legit.

You should try a better way - go on an exchange, or earn the Bitcoin itself, or transfer for cash on LocalBitcoins.  Hell, even a Bitcoin ATM is a better idea than PayPal.

The number of BU nodes has never been significant and obviously it's the hash rate that counts to whether it actually happens.

The number of BU blocks in the past week is still 37.6% to SegWit's 26.6%.

I think that the nodes do represent the users (not completely accurately but to some extent), and it shows how BU is monopolised by Bitmain and other major Chinese companies rather than the vast majority of users (and nodes).  I say let the HF happen so that the BU coin can die from user usage and Jihan Wu comes crawling back to Core.

No one actually argued for socialism - clearly the comparison was between America and European countries, and that broadly, Europe's brand of capitalism results in less extreme wealth inequality.

Notably, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos did not provide a service.  Their employees did, and yet their employees did not receive the appropriate value of the labour that they did - hence why some people become so rich, surplus labour value.  Just like how owning a machine does not mean that you made the cloth from it - it was done by a mixture of the workers and the machines, but people who own this property feel that they have a right to more than an amount of money proportionate to the amount of work they did.

Even in European countries this is a problem, but without socialism which is often economically flawed there are no viable solutions, so all America can do is adopt the slightly less right wing systems of countries like Sweden and Norway, which have very high standards of living and economies, as well as being havens for social progression in my opinion.

Obviously you now know that this is a Ponzi scheme - so here's what that entails.

-Any returns you make will at least partially be made up of similar naive investors who put in some money and lost it.  You're therefore supporting the scheme and indirectly defrauding other investors.  Because of that, you should withdraw all funds from the scheme, if you can, immediately - along with the principal.

-If you can't withdraw your funds from the scheme, you should think about yourself and how long the scheme will pay out for.  I searched for the scheme and I think it's only been operating for about a week and paying out for now.  This means that you might be lucky and make an ROI from it, but do not advertise the scheme to anyone else.

All of those pools are pretty bad.  They all take far more fees than necessary to run the pool or to keep the workers comfortable.  AntPool and BTCC are the worst as they take transaction fees, which are currently quite high meaning that their actual fees are in the region of 10%, far more than you should be paying for a basic service.

The problem with pools is that they can often be owned by companies which own large monopolies on Bitcoin mining, such as Bitmain's ownership of Antpool.  You should ideally go to a small-ish pool - realistically, you can't expect to get ROI too quickly anyway and when you do it'll be pretty minor with just a small amount of machines, so you just need a pool which has low fees even if you don't mine blocks too often.

You could try the Comparison of mining pools on the Bitcoin Wiki if you want help with details.

It is a new branch of Bitcoin though and should be regarded as separate.  When people gain an equal amount of BU coin to their Bitcoin, that'll be against their will, whereas they chose before to hold Bitcoin.  That's absolutely fine, but it should be obvious to people that these are two different coins and the one that they chose to hold is the original Bitcoin, therefore the new coin should be regarded as an alt as it is a newly created coin.

The key difference here is that Core's updates don't split the coin while BU's does.  In the event that the coin is split, it's perfectly reasonable to suggest that the new coin is an altcoin as Bitcoin was the original and BU's coin would be a branch of the original coin which was of their own development.  Just because Bitcoin owners will own BU's coin as well, doesn't make it any less of an altcoin.

What Coinbase also misses here is that the miners do not represent the entire community.  They can (rightly) control what updates go through to the code but the coin which will remain popular will be the one that stays in usage, and I find it hard to believe that would be BU even if they had more hashing power, especially since I don't expect merchants like Steam to adopt it quickly.

Due to unforeseen circumstances I'm having to leave this campaign as I can't really be in a campaign with a minimum posts right now (and I'd prefer to have a higher maximum, as I did a lot this week.

Thank you.

I'm not sure.  Actually I remember something, there's this old program called HTTrack which lets you download whole sites and I think that would include the different branches of the site (you can also take parts of it out if you want I think).  Don't take my word for this though as I haven't had it for a couple years, but I know it's safe anyway.

If you want to use the cache, you could go to chrome://cache which shows what's held in the cache but that might be a bit complex.  Come to think of it it's probably preferably to use HTTrack or another similar program.

I'm not sure how to do it from files, but if you're using Chrome it's dead simple.  Just type chrome://flags into the URL bar and it'll come up with a list of options to do with Chrome.  Find the one related to enabling the cache for online browsing, then go on each branch of the site.  When you want to load it, just relaunch Chrome and the site should be loaded in cache and good to go.  If you do that though, it'll reset when you restart your computer.

North Koreans have access to an intranet, which is a restricted version of the Internet containing only sites created by government officials for informational purposes.  As far as we know, no ordinary civilian in North Korea has access to smartphones or any other entirely free device.

Obviously the North Korean government doesn't have full connection with people who live there, so it's irrelevant to whether North Koreans should have access to banking.  If North Koreans ever had access to the full Internet I hope loads of their hands would be on Bitcoin straight away.  For all we know there could already be black markets building there.

No valid points in the article, just a collection of hyperbolic unsubstantiated claims about BU which are backed up by other people's opinions unless they make what they say correct.

Blatantly cherry-picked information in an attempt to get confirmation biased Core supporters to check out their blog.

The reason that an increased amount of transactions results in a stronger Bitcoin is because people see Bitcoin as being more convenient or more legitimate to use which results in more people using Bitcoin - more people using Bitcoin results in more merchant adoption of it and wider acceptance which in turn again results in more users and a higher price.

You should know if a campaign is full before you sign up.  Clearly you're in too much of a rush to actually think and consider whether the campaign manager would have any chance of accepting you.

Regardless, your posts are very spammy.  Clearly your intention is to try and spam your way through the weekly quota in a few minutes, which you can't just do and actually expect to get paid (or join a campaign, as managers tend to check your past posts before considering accepting you).

Usually I'm pretty skeptical of crypto related news because most of it is pretty weak hyperbolic speculation about Bitcoin dying, or what it is, or whether it's better or worse than this or that.  It's the kind of thing that should be in discussions rather than news, so the forum is much better.