can anyone point me to a crypto commercial that led to anything other than the sap who clicked on it losing their money?

they may not be doing ICO assholes any favours, they certainly are helping out their users. imagine how much smaller something like bitconnect would've been without advertising. maybe not small enough but perhaps the spread would've been slowed before it popped.

now all these guys will have to come up with quality projects that show up in actual searches. and there's still the PR angle which really doesn't seem explored enough.

network effect destroys tech advantages every day of the week, even when it's an area as tech dependent as this.

there may well be better systems out there right now but the longer ethereum stays at the top the less likely people are to investigate other coins and the more willing they are to put up with ethereum's foibles.

there are loads of areas where an alternative is unquestionably better. that doesn't really matter if it never took off. that's not how it should be, but it is that way and it always will be.

the only question is whether the whole platform thing is early enough in the game for something to usurp ethereum. every day ethereum is ahead makes it less likely.

surely dark market adoption is down what the drug dealers dictate. if they refuse to take bitcoin then buyers have no choice but to go buy some monero. if i were in that line of work there's no way i'd be touching bitcoin any more. you simply don't know who's watching and their ability to figure things out.

for better or worse too much of the landscape is now in bed with ethereum for anything to happen this year.

beyond that it could go either way. if it really is a pain in the ass, and i wouldn't know, then new projects may well choose better platforms. it depends on whether the existing ethereum projects continue to grow or those new ones get bigger.

in that scenario then i could imagine ethereum starting to fade if these projects on other platforms are demonstrably superior. we're still in the earliest of early days for all this stuff and especially when it comes to platform coins there's a lot still to play for.

everything starts from somewhere and all coins of this type start off in the hands of the creator and need to be distributed. that's their nature.

all of this griping is about how it moves on from the starting phase. i'm sure tonych doesn't want this situation to continue any more than anyone else. he wants it to be in the hands of as many people as possible and that includes others taking the responsibility for witnessing out of his hands.

this is still the super early days. expect the need for a lot of stuff needing to be ironed out and figured out.

since you must know your way around computing already why not dig through some of the code of open source wallets available? there's more than a few.

A couple of the biggest bitcoin wallets - https://github.com/bitpay/copay

https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum


the biggest ethereum wallet

https://github.com/MyEtherWallet


the most widely used hardware wallet, plus this one does multiple coins too.

https://github.com/trezor

you might pick up some stuff you're familiar with already.

freewallet is pretty much the last custodial wallet out there. i'm amazed anyone still uses it but like you said you didn't do your homework.

i've read a few experiences with it on alt forums. from what i can tell from the experiences of others they're not outright scammers, but they are slow assholes. you're at the mercy of their support. i reckon you're in with a good chance of getting your issue resolved eventually just like all the crappy exchanges out there but you might be in for a wait.

once it is resolved you know what to do next - leave and don't look back.

i would never use bitcoin for anything questionable. you simply don't know how good law enforcement is these days and i'm not interested in anything questionable or good enough at keeping my anonymity up.

i'm kinda surprised bitcoin is still used at all when stuff like monero is now big enough to support a decent amount of commerce.

i've said it before but i'll say it again, the whole 'we're saving this scamcoin by building a new one for the victims' rarely covers the fact that it was buyable for dust in its dead state on yobit.

that nips a couple of problems in the bud. no need for an ICO or premine and an instant audience interested in the narrative. all they had to do was buy as much as possible under the radar and then announce their wonder plan.

everyone has to eat of course. it still leaves a cynical taste. i hope everything does come through for anyone who put some money in.

i certainly hope so. it would be an extremely incompetent court that left the coins with this guy to have a play.

say what you like about bitfinex, but they made the right call when it came to their hack. it's now four years in and still no one has a penny from gox's remains with no real idea of when they'll get anything still.

there were proposals to resurrect gox to enable the payback of everyone from its earnings, though i really hope that was with new management and exemplary practices. if that had gone through people would've been made whole ages ago.

i will guess that 95-99.9% of ico and crypto ads point towards either worthless crap, scams or good old plain phishing sites. it would be no great loss to anyone other than the scammers themselves.

and people here don't adblock? i've never seen any of these ads. all the stuff you're looking for doesn't need to be advertised. you search for it. that's what google's for.

it ends when this wallet is empty, probably in a few weeks - http://insight.bitcore.cc/address/13hwgY4YUvrgnhjLP5ugFafL1cmbRRtr5e

no one knows what'll happen. the closest comparison we have is byteball which has pretty much stopped airdropping after a lot of excitement surrounding the airdrops. that's resulted in a lower price and much less interest.

let's see what the bitcore team is made of.

as others have said it can probably be easily gamed. even if it can't, it really does not sound usable in a practical way.

money itself is a tool. people use tools that work and reject tools that don't. this would actively hinder users. the idea of ideology hard coded into a currency is an interesting one but ideology needs to come from an angle that people will be prepared to tolerate.

there've been variations on this in the past. freicoin has demurrage built in.

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/freicoin/

this tells you how popular an idea it is with users.

i've seen people saying that they are now sending out coins, not that that should've been possible, and they're working their way up starting at the smallest amounts, presumably so they themselves stay one step ahead of the dumpers and dump themselves.

i'm not sure whether people had to do any extra crap like send bitcoin from the address that should remain empty anyway to get this. 

this is a very interesting one. i've used giftoff a few times. it worked great.

this is also one of very few, or maybe the only for all i know, token sale based on something that's making actual money right now.

there is no alternative to how it is.

the crypto market grew out of nothing. it's open to everyone and everything. every nasty aspect of human nature is gonna be on display.

the way it moves on to the next phase is to shake out the crap and the scum and push that to the sidelines. the only way you achieve that is to let it play out naturally until the winners are chosen by the majority. at that point no one is interested in the junk any more apart from morons in the shadows.

and the strife is nothing to do with the current price action. there'll always be strife. last year's price rises took place amongst the worst infighting ever seen.

99.8% of bcash searches were probably for bitcoin anyway and crudely hijacked. the sooner it dies the better for everyone or if they had any balls at all they'd do a proper rebrand and make a success of it on an honest basis.

no hype can last forever. the crypto hype was epic. it'll come back some day with a vengeance. we're lucky to have such tools available to us.

poloniex of course.

that's been bought out by circle who have goldman sachs backing, among many others, plus the SEC okayed the sale.

https://twitter.com/nathanielpopper/status/968202570719117313/photo/1

it doesn't get much more establishment than that.

other exchanges will probably have to get into bed in a similar manner with bigger players or shut down. the free for all is gonna be over very soon for anywhere that deals with  america at least. 

i certainly would not choose to mine. that's far too much outlay and far too much risk in case difficulties go crazy or there's a general crash. maybe 0.1% of crypto users would ever consider that option.

i'm interested to see how p2p develops in china. they apparently have dedicated telegram groups and stuff. the escrow element is something that needs solving for good. localbitcoins is just as prone to being hammered as anything else on the open internet.

the ideal would be a fully legit tether, but inevitably that will be the most regulated and strangled of all.

the ultimate option would be more and more people choosing to forego fiat completely. at that point there's little that can be done. there must be people already who live a good chunk of their lives without ever touching fiat themselves. i hope it continues to grow.

'today'? nope. he didn't nominate the period of time over which the coins were sold. he announced they were sold after it was done and he managed an average of around $10,000.

do you really think someone even that unschooled in markets would sell over 50,000 coins in one day?

the sales mean all of gox's debts are now covered. he has no reason and no right to sell any more. the fate of the rest of the coins is yet to be decided.