The legality of Bitcoin exchanges is very hazy in a lot of countries, but generally they are legal and not too heavily regulated.

However, some exchanges (such as Coinbase) have introduced some pretty draconian measures for verifying your identity and this could be interpreted as the American government acting harshly as Coinbase mostly operates in America.

Most exchanges are OK when dealing with small amounts, especially the major normal exchanges (Coinbase is a tad unusual), like Bitstamp or Bitfinex.

You are right in saying that Bitcoin is seldom classed as a currency by governments.  Usually it is classed as an asset/property and due to that it is regulated less and arguably this makes it more convenient to do Bitcoin transactions.

Pretty sure bitminer is even worse than that, it's some kind of selective scam which pays out systematically to certain people in a bid to sustain its legitimacy and appeal to naive newbies.

Seems like just the title here should be enough to put off just about any potential lender.

A lot of gamblers grossly misunderstand the concept of probability and its relation to gambling, such as the belief that if they have lost a couple of times they're more likely to win the next or vice versa.  I find that some even believe the opposite, that they can have a "lucky streak" and that if they keep going they can keep winning, but what they don't understand is that the house will always win in the end no matter how big their wins are so they need to pull out as soon as they start for their own good and not take their wins in the short term as evidence for the future.

Well the interface is pretty smooth and the faucet is nice, but is it provably fair? When was this website created?  Any other details about ownership etc that are needed?  For all I know this could be a quick scam site to get some investments.

Damn, that's a pretty solid post.

But I have to disagree, DASH only has about 15% the market cap of Ethereum and is by far inferior to either that or Bitcoin.  There are very few actual technical explanations available as to why DASH is genuinely better than any other major cryptocurrency, especially considering all the different currencies that are created every day.  You argue that DASH is proving to be a strong coin, but DASH has existed since 2014 and has not risen in value at all whereas now it's suddenly been pumped to a ridiculously high price.

I'm not sure that giving your ID would be a good idea on a public forum with people that are good at tracking your identity.  It would be very bad for your security sending it to anyone, especially those who might not be trustworthy themselves.

Everything can and will be compromised, but there are hundreds of cryptocurrencies giving their best shot at anonymity and more are being created every day.  People who want as close to anonymity as they can get will always know that it's very easy to just convert some of their Bitcoin to this new anonymous currency and then leave no trace as to where they actually sent it. 

Maybe to some extent it's a good thing in that it takes authorities' attention away from Bitcoin, which is widely used on the dark web anyway, and instead focuses on what they will always be focusing on anyway.

I'm not sure that any of these would be effective in the practical sense, because generally not a lot of these startups are genuinely being created regularly.  Most decent Bitcoin investments are solely centered around digital goods or Bitcoin's use online.  This may change in time, especially with the moral values of some musicians and artists who may polarise around the use of Bitcoin and we'll see if it becomes a good investment then, but for now I'd say that investments like casino bankrolls are probably the best if you have a large amount.

To be fair, people aren't always right.

All this actually shows is that a lot of people believe that the BU split will mess up Bitcoin, not whether it actually will, and posts like this might even compel more people to sell, so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

We don't know what the effect on Bitcoin will be after the split - it might even be that Bitcoin does a lot better because of the investments beforehand from people intending to either dump the BUcoin or Bitcoin and move to the other one (the hyperbole will get through to people on different sides to make different investments).

This is pretty funny.  Not only are you pretending to offer a service which doubles your Bitcoins (which is impossible), you're even acting as if you're impartial by showing your supposed "investment" which isn't actually proof of anything!

Not to mention that you're posting on a new account and there are loads of maths errors on the site (the amount returned to investors claims to be more than double what they put in, even contradicting the scams which are presented on the website! It's lies within lies!

Learning English is not necessary to be intelligent and most Chinese people learn to speak very good English in schools anyway.  This is extremely offensive and arrogant of you to assume that Chinese people are below you, seemingly out of spite because they own some growing monopolies in Bitcoin mining (good for them, while I don't think it's good for Bitcoin it's not like white people never gain profit from growing investments).  I think that your point would be made a lot better without racism. 

I don't think it's the end for BU because a lot of miners are monopolies in China (especially Bitmain) which for whatever reason are pretty desperate for BU to go through.  This results in a rise in more hashing power going to BU because then miners feel that they need to go with the majority of hashing power to find a scaling solution as quickly as possible.

However, it might be the end for BUcoin as a currency.  Being listed as an altcoin on exchanges and not being used for withdrawals will hurt its price significantly and a lot of the biggest money will still go towards Bitcoin Core Bitcoins, especially from those who are used to the older Bitcoin or that expect that coin to do better.  Unfortunately since nearly no one actually runs a full node, it's pretty hard for users to have a lot of say in what happens, but what this does mean is that BU is likely to fail even if the hard fork happens.

This is perfect.  People need to take a different view of wallets because Bitcoin is genuinely a currency than can have everyday use rather than just being viewed as an asset to hold forever.

My advice for people's use of wallets is similar to my advice for their money storage in real life:

-If you're only interested in trading, hold a hardware wallet for storage at home and send smaller amounts to the exchange for use in everyday trading.  If you have smaller amounts, holding it in a lightweight desktop wallet would be fine as long as you're very careful about what sites you access.

-If you're interested in Bitcoin as an investment in itself and want to hold it for a long time, hold it in a dedicated hardware wallet, paper wallet or computer wallet and don't mess around with it ever, especially if you're holding large amounts.

-If you're interested in Bitcoin as a currency and want to hold large amounts, keep some of it in a cold or hardware wallet and leave some in a web wallet for convenient everyday use.  If you're holding small amounts, keeping it all in a web wallet is fine as long as it's quite secure and free like Blockchain.

There are so many uses that Bitcoin has and people always need to find different combinations for their individual situations.  I'm most interested in Bitcoin as a currency and for now only hold small amounts of it, which is why I keep it in my online wallet.

I'm not sure how this is possible if you had 2fa enabled as the attacker would need to have access to your phone as well as your password.

It could be that you signed up to a fake trading site (the name is not mentioned) and that they then scammed you out of your Bitcoin, or that you accidentally signed up on a fake version of the trading site which you were trying to use with a very slightly different title, in which case they could have taken a deposit and took it to an external wallet, leading you to believe that you had been hacked.

It could even be that your click on a phishing link was on your phone, meaning that they infected your phone with a virus that was capable of finding your 2fa code as well as your password when you sign in to the website, but that seems incredibly unlikely and difficult to happen so I get the feeling that you made a mistake and sent your Bitcoin to the wrong site.

Still, you need to be more than "careful not to view any link that will steal my btc".  You need to be very vigilant and think about each link individually with virus and url checks etc.  You also need to have a system for spotting phishing links and a set of criteria for what a legitimate site is like and what information it provides.

I don't think that this is the key message of the article.  The ideal thing to invest in may change and Bitcoin will just be a great currency, but the article is more focused around any long term investments you may choose to make, with its focus mainly being on keeping safe by never being naive enough to think you can just instantly become successful in this, and I think that many people responding to this post are being the naive people that he considers in the article - people who think they can tell you exactly how high Bitcoin is going to go when they can't say what it'll be tomorrow.

Nothing is 100% stable and people need to be careful.

Nearly all of these accounts probably are hacked, but one of the key problems is that the forum is very hands-off so they're faced with the dilemma of finding out how to prove that these accounts are hacked without intruding on people's privacy.  It must be pretty difficult.

I suppose the main problem is the security breach from a while ago, which people are now exploiting because these dormant users never managed to change their passwords as they haven't been on this forum for a long time.

I really, really wouldn't recommend buying DASH now, but if you want to do it, this isn't the best way.

You should go to an altcoin exchange, the biggest of which is Poloniex.  Buying from people will only get you scammed, unless you're a scammer yourself, in which case you won't have a lot of luck here.

I think that the main reason people make decisions too much based on their emotions is because they put too much money into exchanges.

If you take a big risk and you're not experienced enough to use your brain, it's inevitable that you'll sell at a pretty low point.

The key rule that needs to be followed to manage people's emotions is don't invest more than you can afford to lose.  That way, if you take a risky investment like cryptocurrency you can look at it from a neutral and logical perspective rather than your fear of losing the money you put in.  If you can't handle the heat or you're not experienced enough to do it, you shouldn't invest any significant amounts into cryptocurrency at all.

But you don't know when DASH will reach its peak or when Bitcoin will reach its bottom.  I would even argue that DASH has already reached its peak of around $100 and is not being pumped so much anymore.  I think that the pumpers who have made it this high are trying to simulate a real rise by holding it up long enough for it to actually receive market adoption, but it's very unlikely to happen.

Bitcoin won't be on its way down for a long time, so why panic sell when it's at a comparatively low point?  The best place to sell Bitcoin was a couple of weeks ago and if I had owned more Bitcoin I would have done that anyway.

Regardless, people are talking about DASH as if it's on its way to Bitcoin but its market cap is many, many times lower than that of Bitcoin.  A huge amount of the problem is just that its supply is less than half that of Bitcoin which creates the illusion that its price is high when its actual market cap is still very low.

Ethereum is doing a LOT better than DASH and it will still never reach the same levels that Bitcoin is already at.

This isn't exactly easy for most people to do.  The article claims that it's easy and that's it's as simple as downloading the most recent version of Bitcoin Core, but as the article later points out it requires over 100gb of your disk space to be dedicated to it (an amount which most people aren't willing to designate to one thing for slight benefits over a specific provider).  It also mentions that for practical purposes you need to keep your decent computer running pretty much 24/7, which is also impractical and people would need to take some serious backups of their expensive hard drive etc.