A scaling solution that will result in Bitcoin splitting between the old Bitcoin and a new coin called BTU which will have a flexible block size and be listed on exchanges as an altcoin (but we'll see how it actually goes) and everyone who holds Bitcoin will own an equal amount of BTU as they already do in BTC.

I agree, people have started buying into Bitcoin because of the hype about its temporarily high price, but now that it's dropping some newbies have started to panic sell.  Bitcoin can't just be going up all the time.

Dash is definitely not better for anonymity than Bitcoin.

Monero is quite anonymous.  While Bitcoin users generally ask you not to reuse addresses, Monero enforces this.  It also makes use of different signatures which obscure what can be seen about the transaction.  However, Monero is under investigation by authorities and you should never trust that your preferred currency will be entirely safe.

It's not, it's even worse than DASH, this one is just a pure scam.  Doesn't matter how many videos or About Us pages that don't even explain how their scam works but just peddle around it and expect you to give them loads of money, they're just a full-on scam.  There's nothing that even indicates that they're a cryptocurrency.

Bitcoin is as strong as it's ever been, its price is still well above what it was just a few months ago.  You can't expect it to be at an ATH all the time and just keep going up the same amounts forever.  Regardless, even though BU is arguably responsible for the temporary fall in price, Antpool is not the only group which switched to BU or is going to make it happen.
 

Read the sticky.  No one wants to give you Bitcoin for PayPal.  You might think you can get away with it because you're only asking for a small amount, but there are warnings about that too and people aren't stupid.

The price has been pretty crazy for the past few months, maybe it's a good sign that it's settling down.  It'll give the more dedicated Bitcoiners time to buy.

No matter how many people repeat that same statement, it won't make it true.

Obviously you can't be accurate about it but there can be a general estimate.

Blockchain.info claims that there have been 206 million Bitcoin transactions, ever.  It also estimates that 30 days ago, there were about 197 million transactions, so in the region of 9 million transactions in the past month, which amounts to 0.3 million, or 300,000 transactions each day on average.

Then you're left with the dilemma of how many people holding Bitcoin actually spending it, and the number for that will be significantly lower.  But guessing conservatively that every person owning Bitcoin does a transaction on average once every 3 days, that would be 100,000 people using Bitcoin.

True.  You can accept Bitcoin but not necessarily as a primary payment.  Sometimes, it's a good idea to just earn fiat currency somehow and convert it to Bitcoin, because there are so many more ways to earn fiat.

But unfortunately, it isn't resistant to private control.  The richest private companies could quite easily monopolise mining as Bitmain is already starting to do.  Sometimes, decentralisation can just mean centralisation in an equally corrupt private sector - mining needs to nearly as accessible as spending with Bitcoin, otherwise there will never be a diverse collection of companies which make the industry decentralised.

Double spending is when someone tries to spend the same Bitcoins in two different transactions at the same time.  If the user sending you a payment is attempting to double spend, this means that they are not trustworthy and you should be very careful dealing with them.

This is a strange fallacy and I think it rose from the common description of Bitcoin as "digital gold" which definitely no one described it at the start of Bitcoin's creation.

Bitcoin was always supposed to be a currency.  Satoshi would tell you that and he did, in the white paper for Bitcoin entitled "Bitcoin: A Peer To Peer Electronic Cash System".  It really couldn't get much clearer than that.

What Satoshi also wanted was for Bitcoin's code to be open source, which it is, and for necessary modifications to be made to it, which they are.  BU is not a good modification to make but if the majority of hashing power supports it that will be what rightfully changes the code and creates a new version.

But I think that a large amount of Bitcoin's price increase has been based on the hope that it could one day be used more frequently for transactions and that it would be capable of doing so.  Other coins will usually not actually be any better than Bitcoin, the illusion of this would just be created through the low volume of transactions that those smaller coins are actually used for.

I agree.  I don't condone PayPal and definitely don't believe that it's an ideal payment method, but PayPal is generally doing pretty well right now.

I think that this shows the misconception that because Bitcoin is doing well, other payment methods must be doing poorly, which is certainly not the case.  Bitcoin is still only a tiny fraction of the market and PayPal offers a convenience through its centralisation and use of fiat currency that Bitcoin cannot realistically provide despite the optimism of many of its users.

Generally I think that miners tend to consider their profits and the popularity of the pool more than the affiliation of the pool.  The pool/company on the other hand usually makes the decision based on what they think will gain them the most profit in the long term, or in the case of the more principled pools, what they think is best for the Bitcoin network (and often these two things will be related).

However I think that miners should have a little bit of principle here, because there are several pools of similar specs which have different affiliations and it should not be a problem for miners to swap between them.

Unfortunately even wallets are sometimes not safe as it is fully reliant on either the web wallet's security in the case of web wallets (which are just as bad as exchanges security wise) or partially reliant on a third party and partially reliant on you.  You could even not be reliable at all, as your computer could get infected with malware, crash without a backup, or a whole host of other things.  The same applies to fiat currency but it's very annoying how difficult it is to stay safe with a currency which by nature should be quite secure.

Yeah, but while true, this statistic was clearly chosen as a means to promote hyperbole.  We, and they, seldom use the market cap to describe Bitcoin's value or price.  You could talk about Bitcoin's value falling by $100, but they chose $2 billion to sound like Bitcoin is failing.

Generally, considering just before the start of the year Bitcoin was trading at around $800, it's pretty impressive that it still hasn't fell back to there yet for a good three months despite the threat of hard fork etc.

I'm not sure what you mean.  Nothing on the blockchain is "legally enforcable", because Bitcoin is not a legal currency in any country and the addresses are pseudonymns which can't be linked to individuals.

Probably not, but if you have an investment size of >$50k you might be able to for less time than that as long as you have a backup plan (a secondary job or skills that could warrant one).

You need to understand that every 4 years block rewards will be cut in half, which will result in your profits being more and more reliant on transaction fees which will vary depending on various factors related to the network.

However, you mention that you have free electricity on another of your posts, and that's a good start.

I agree, TREZOR seems to be the most trusted hardware wallet by far, and it mentions its use by major Bitcoin exchanges.  It's immune to viruses and is perfect for security as well as being quite convenient.

Yes but actually gaining Bitcoin is a different matter.

Unfortunately you can't really use exchanges as nearly all them try to verify your age in some way and if you were found out it would be a problem.

I think that most altcoin exchanges don't actually verify your age, whether or not they suggest that you should be over 18.  In that case, you could buy Bitcoin with a debit card (which services occasionally allow without ID for small amounts), or an altcoin if that's more convenient and you can keep away from scams, and you could trade it pretty well.

In the spirit of Bitcoin's privacy, most services won't verify your age and you should be OK.