bitcoin used to be both an investment and an online currency for me to use to buy anything that i need from the internet with it.
but these days the high transaction fees makes me want to do less transactions and just stick to the investment part. and then hope that we can get SegWit sooner so we can get out of this slump so that i can continue spending my bitcoin.

well do you have any proposals? we will hear them if you have any good ones.

in my experience there is no difference between an altcoin with some seconds to a minute block generation time and bitcoin's 10 minute because when i make a deposit with that altcoin in an exchange wallet they usually want some ridiculously high number of confirmation (understandable number though). and that will take the same amount of time for full confirmation!

and that is if their network is not attacked and forked during that time!

thanks for the heads up.
i think i need to go around in all exchanges that i have an account on and check their withdrawal fees. they all seem to have changed it recently.
for example bittrex used to take 20K satoshi for their fees but i found out yesterday that they have increased it to 100K. and now yobit to a 150K! things are getting out of hand with these exchanges.

the only way that you can not-give your ID is if you buy face to face with cash. in any other way your identity will leak somehow. even when buying from btc-e and using their fiat deposit methods your fiat accounts such as PM are linked to you in one way or another.

all the rest will need your ID and there are many good ones mostly depending on where you live but usually coinbase, kraken, cex.io are the ones i suggest.

in my opinion PTC is a waste of time, but apparently other people don't think the same.
the only thing you need to do is to pay a competetive rate to those who are a fan of PTC sites and offer a decent number of ads for them to click on.
for base you need to set it to money since bitcoin price is changing.
and as for fees you just pay in bulk like what PTC sites do with fiat at the end of each week or every other day for example.
and also you can always add altcoins. Litecoin and Dogecoin are two good options you can use. it can either be earning in those coins or just getting paid by converting the BTC value to those and do a quick payment.

also remember that bitcoin won't stay like this forever. and if you plan on running the site for years you have to keep it in mind that the scaling issue will be solved eventually and all the fee problems would be temporary.

as much as i love slow and steady rises, they never last. there are some long periods that last from time to time but in the end they will all end in a big and fast rise.
last year we saw a more stable rise with less wild rises but this year it seems like Japan changed all the equations once again and the fast rises is what we have got for the near future.

i've got one question for you:
why even share this? if it really works then go ahead and double your bitcoin every 10 hours.
do you want competition?

one thing that i always find stupid about these posts like the screenshot OP shared is that why are they even telling the public about it! if they were to scam and really had private keys and ability to steal the coins of those who used that website, then he wouldn't have shared it in public, he would have just emptied the wallets and then shared and laughed about it!

^^ this

remember not so long ago pre-mining altcoins was so popular? everyone was creating an altcoin with a huge pre-mine. then websites like coinmarketcap started adding a * on their names and then a ** on those with significant pre-mine, and people were handing over millions by then too.
today if you tell someone that coin is a pre-mine they will stay away.

the same will happen to ICOs soon. and i don't think it has any effect on bitcoin in any way. altcoins have always been the stupid gambling market to risk and make more bitcoin or risk and lose a lot.

bitcoin is money so just like money you work for it and get paid, it can even be a real job in real world and asking your boss to pay your salarry in bitcoin!
you can also buy it with fiat.

altcoins are just speculation too so your only way is to buy them with money or bitcoin. you can also mine them if you have good tools and cheap electricity.

we can't say anything about during SegWit or the first days, it may be a huge rise or it may be nothing. but in long term price will rise because Segwit will put the scaling issue behind us by solving it and that is good.

about BTU i have to say the coin doesn't exist, if you are trading it you are just trading something fake that the one exchange added to make money!!!

and in case of a split you may not get the same price. in your example if price of bitcoin is $10000 and a split happens you may get two coins one worth $2000 and the other $3000 with a total of $5000!

i strongly disagree. what you are saying is only true about bitcoin not all the cryptocurrencies.
outside of here, if you ever get out in the real world, you can clearly see that a very limited number of people have ever heard about bitcoin and when it comes to altcoins nobody has ever heard about them! which menas the altcoins are the usual pump and dump. nothing new.

the best way to invest in bitcoin is to do it slowly in my opinion. for example buy some amounts that you can afford with the extra money that you have and don't need. you can do it every 2 weeks or every month and keep it in cold storage.
the long term always wins.

and as for altcoins, i suggest staying away for now because of 2 reasosn. first you are new and have to know they are pump and dump and second altcoins are in a big bubble right now.

let me explain tht title a little better:

assume block 470000 was mined right now. i go to a service and make a withdrawal (this has actually happened with my BTC withdrawals from exchanges) the transaction that i receive has a locktime of 470000!

so my question is why include that in a transaction, it will be mined because it is over the time anyways with the next block 470001!

the problem is people think of any price correction as a "fall" or "dump". of course price goes down, but the only thing that you need to pay attention to is why did the price went down and by how much.

for example when price goes up from $1250 to $2700 every newbie knows that is a fast rise. but what they don't know is the fact that this fast rise needs to stop, corrects and then continues rising. and that can be seen from the drop to $1900-$2000 after the first rise.

and this are not the only case. the bitcoin chart is full of them. each time there is a price rise, then a FOMO leading to a big rise, then a fall when they panic sell and then rise even more.

paying fees higher than 400 satoshi per byte is for a 100% guaranteed confirmation in next block.

you can do two things:
- pay a lesser fee. anything above 150-200 satoshi per byte would do.
- learn more about what RBF transactions are and use them.

with 200 s/b you can get a confirmation in next 5 blocks most of the times these days. and it is good if you are not in a hurry.
and RBF should be used in case anything changed and that fee was not enough you increase it to 400 easily and have a confirmation fast.

have been doing this with 200-220 s/b so far without any problems.

in theory what he is working on (based on the things that i have read so far on the project) will introduce bitcoin to a lot of people and opens up the way for file sharing community to add money to the whole thing. and that is a good thing both for bitcoin and for file sharers who want to monetize their contents.
how successful it will be in reality remains to be seen.

locking this topic now since the chance to buy was when price went down to $1900 fo an extremely short time and then stayed around $2000 for enough time for everyone to buy.
those who bought are not $500+ in profit, those who didn't will regret it like always and continue waiting for the drop to $10 to buy

if by going down you mean anything under $2000 then i wouldn't count on it if i were you. anything is possible in bitcoin but as i always say getting hit by lightning is also possible!
you need to get used to seeing $2500 buddy.


using caps doesn't change anything about any type of "eye problem", there is zoom in any browser.

but no merchant accepts ethereum! it is not even a currency to be accepted as payment. and besides the fees are pretty high there too, they are getting very close to $1 now!

and you will have a much better chance finding a merchant that accepts Doge coin or Litecoin instead and they have a much lower fee and a much better security with no bugs.