Well the best pools are those that charge relatively low fees (e.g. Jonny's pool which I understand is about 0.5% with the transaction fees shared), and also either mine blocks often enough for you to have a reasonable income, or will mine them often enough in the future.

Generally if you're mining you don't expect to have a really serious income, which is why it's okay for some pools to not mine blocks for a few months at a time, so moderately small pools can be OK as well and therefore the main factor you should consider is the fees.

You can find the Bitcoin Wiki's list which will help you to find the best pool for your needs.

No, it's impossible.  It doesn't matter whether Bitcoin is anonymous or pseudonymous because the pseudonymn is different for every transaction in most cases, or at least different for every new sender.

All you would be able to do is search for the revenues of specific sites by talking to them and trying to deduce the percentages based on a sample size and its relevance to the market cap.  It wouldn't be accurate, but it would be as close as you could get.

That was clearly rounded, the point is that the value of Ethereum can never come close to that of Bitcoin because there are far more coins.  This changes the way that we should look at Ethereum because the only relevant thing we should consider about Ethereum is its market cap, not its price.

For BU to be activated, 75% of the mining power needs to support it.  If this were the case, the chances are that BU would have a majority of support and therefore that your previous coins would lower dramatically in value. 

The value of new Bitcoin/BUcoin will also drop dramatically temporarily due to those who do not support and the fear/sometimes FUD of a hard fork.

This is just pathetic.  So many exchanges that work in a conventional way and don't dictate everything that you have to do.  Bitcoin exchanges need to meet the aims of Bitcoin and not attack a community which nearly always values their privacy.

Coinbase is terrible to exploit traders and limit so many aspects of their accounts.  It's a shame that some people who use it don't care enough about their privacy to refuse to give their documents, which is the only thing that could stop this.

With online wallets, Blockchain is definitely comparatively secure and offers a lot of good security options for people who need it.  Fees from the actual wallets are always very low compared to the transaction fees paid to Bitcoin miners and you can never compromise the safety of your Bitcoin for the sake of penny pinching.

This isn't strictly true.  Most cloud mining services are scams as they often suggest static payouts and do not explain block difficulty - this means that they are essentially Ponzi schemes claiming to invest in Bitcoin, which they obviously do not.

However, cloud mining sites are not inherently Ponzis, it's just that they are very hard to trust due to the lack of available verification.

You need to understand what Ponzis actually are though.  Ponzis might pay out at first, they will just turn scams as they pay out with the investment of later investors, which is why you need to avoid them so well.

But if you're talking about usually and your tendencies, that's just suggesting that there are certain periods when you're more likely to be in the mood.  So I suppose most gamblers don't actually schedule their gambling, they just do it when they feel like it besides reasonable limits.

To be fair, it's pretty funny.  If anyone actually invests in this thing, they deserve to lose their money, but I hope they can have a good laugh in the process, especially if anyone invests in them who doesn't actually see the name properly or notice all the lies on the site.

Most of these sites invent some vague crap about what industry they're in and don't give any details about the actual investment, but at least this site is ironic enough.

To be fair, the price was comparatively stable from 2015 and most of 2016.  It's a strange phenomenon that the price is so crazy right now.  You don't need any certain to speculate, hence the subforum. 

I would say that the threat of a hard fork, regardless of whether it's well organised or not, is always going to make the price struggle a little bit.  There's also the FUD about Bitcoin in general and the rising prices of altcoins, but I think that most investors are secure enough in their investments.  The price has even had a slight rebound since then, it's not consistently going down.

But since the amount of money you own is significantly less than the house, if you continue gambling forever you will eventually lose even if the house had no advantage at all over you. 

The problem is that people never just stop forever.  They might gamble once, make a profit and leave, but someday when they have a much larger amount of money, they're likely to come back and throw it all away, hoping they can get away with it.  It's possible to control but it can be hard.

Well I would never actually call it dead until it was literally worth $0 (unless fiat currencies collapsed altogether and the two were incomparable, which is extremely unlikely).  If it was under about $150, I would sell it and leave, but I think that the word "dead" is used too commonly and it takes away any genuine meaning for when things are dead.

I mean, do you actually understand what a Ponzi scheme is?

"a form of fraud in which belief in the success of a non-existent enterprise is fostered by the payment of quick returns to the first investors from money invested by later investors."

The earlier investors in Dash and other altcoins, even the scam ones, are not given payouts, they still trade them as is the point of Poloniex.  Therefore none of them are Ponzi scheme nor scams in the sense that you describe them.

Regardless, Poloniex does not use bots, it's only Poloniex users that sometimes use bots to enhance their trading, as they sometimes do on other exchanges as well.  This is nothing new.

Exactly.  The key distinction here is that Bitcoin is a digital currency, and is by far best used and most convenient for digital items.  People like convenient payments for small everyday transactions, and that's why we have situations where you either pay with cash, which is instant, or by credit card, which for most conventional purposes is instant.  For the really small transactions, the $1-10 transactions which we go through every day, it's also much, much cheaper (in the case of Visa cards, about 0.2%).  

Bitcoin is best used for large digital transactions as fees are based on the byte which tend to result in it being a lot cheaper for large transactions, and best suited to digital transactions as it is very convenient when dealing with others online, especially people you don't trust with personal information.

Good decision.  Most of the major altcoins are at about the highest peak they're going to reach for a long time.  Everyone keeps considering that ETH or Dash or Montero or anything might be the future but to me it seems like a combination of FUD about Bitcoin, FOMO from less experienced investors and huge pumps (especially on Dash).

Altcoin users buy small amount of several different altcoins, and that's why altcoins will never overtake Bitcoin and will never stay up forever.

True.  You can't create arbitrary amounts to earn.  If you work a certain amount of time for anyone using the skills that you have, you will earn roughly what your work is worth (minus some profit for the employer).

Also, depositing a small amount of money will not get you significant gains as no one is just going to rapidly give far more money back than you pay in.

You don't need a business professional to answer most of these questions, it's just knowledge for most people who take an interest.  I'll answer the ones that I can and other people can fill the gaps.

3.  There is a transaction fee, it's to pay people who verify transactions in the private sector ("miners").
4.  You send to a specified "address" which is a long sequence of letters and numbers which is usually changed regularly for each person (and some people have many addresses for different groups to send to them).
5.  No one controls the Bitcoin network.  That's the glory of it, it's decentralised.  The code is open source and was originally created by the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto.
6.  The advantages:
-Bitcoin is designed to deflate over time as the number of new Bitcoins introduced decreases over time and will eventually halt.  This means that your invested money will most likely increase in value (as it has thousands of per cent in the last few years), as Bitcoin becomes more popular.
-Bitcoin is near anonymous and, when used right, can keep your privacy safe when doing sensitive transactions online.  You also don't have to give any personal information out as all anyone needs is an address.
-Bitcoin's fees are comparatively low for large transactions as they are based on the number of bytes/amount of data in a transaction, so larger transactions are very cheap and easy compared to other payment systems.
Disadvantages:
-Bitcoin is not backed up by any physical asset so it could be risky if people deem it worthless.
-For small transactions Bitcoin is currently quite inconvenient due to pressure on the network (there are scaling debates on fixing this which have been going on for a while, watch that space and they might get better).
7. Bitcoin is legal in most jurisdictions, with some minor exclusions.  If you're in America, for example, it is definitely legal, but is of course not legal tender.
8. As far as we know, Bitcoin is secure, and as long as you use an offline or hardware wallet and keep it very private and safe, you will be secure as the Bitcoin network itself is very secure.

No, it's really not.  Cryptography is not hard, it's just basic systems of ciphering and nearly any decent computer could do that, not to mention that Google is a multi-billion dollar company and Satoshi Nakamoto was obviously not.

A cryptocurrency is an invention.  AIs cannot create complex thought systems like Bitcoin, and if they could there's no reason that someone would invent an AI with several years of work and hundreds of workers just to create something else.  Satoshi was on this forum, satoshi spoke to us as a human would, and just as no other person on this forum is an AI because it makes no sense and is all but impossible, satoshi was not an AI.

That doesn't make sense.  Mining has always operated in the private sector and naturally chooses transactions with the highest fee first.

It's not the miners' fault that the network is struggling to handle the growing number of transactions.  For now, just keep your fees high and suck it up.  Trust me, there are good times coming if you keep your Bitcoin.

Yes, this site is a Ponzi scheme and most likely not paying by this point.  You need to look for some clear indicators:

-When you search Google for the image which they imply is of a Jayden Woods, it comes up with a different doctor.

-Searching Jayden Woods does not come up with medical professionals at all, or even adults.  Someone with a supposedly established career should be first up.

-Their domain was registered in 1996 but was made into their site within the past two years according to people here.

This site is blatantly a scam because it offers ridiculous payouts and Ponzi schemes have nearly all dried up by now.