I disagree.  Bitcoin is designed to have more convenient transactions.  If a person sets lower fees, the transaction either takes a long time to confirm or doesn't confirm at all.  That's why there are loads of different threads on the forum with the same topic, talking about when their transaction is finally going to confirm.

If Bitcoin users have to decide between extremely inconvenient and extremely expensive transactions then Bitcoin has been unsuccessful in its purpose as a currency.

Yes, but Bitcoin mining is pretty risky to get into now because:
-You don't know what transaction fees etc. will be in the future so your income will not be consistent.

-In 4 years there will be another 'halving' in which the rewards for mining a block will be cut in half, making it harder to profit.

-You need to consider exactly how resolutions to block size issues are going to affect mining.

Fortunately what will make you profit is holding the Bitcoin you earn, as it is most likely that the price will rise over time.

This is a common fallacy related to trade.  People can't just follow the market as it is moving because by the time the trend is big enough to be noticeable, it's too late and you'll end up buying high and selling low.  The main people who make profit are the people who do a combination of recognising past trends in the market.  What they also need to do is predict future trends in the market by recognising possible news and predicting the results of things that happen (e.g. the ETF).  If you do it when you see other people do it, you're too late.  You're only on time if you see what's making them buy/sell.

Buying now is an OK or moderately bad idea.  The ideal time to buy was right after the ETF when there was a brief panic sell bringing the price to under $1100, or even before when there was some volatility right at the start of the year.  The ideal time to sell will be after block size issues are sorted and Bitcoin starts being used more commonly as a currency, raising its price, unless you are the sort of person that trades daily, in which case there are numerous places to buy and sell.

Well the net profit and return on investment are pretty directly linked - you can't just invest next to nothing and expect to get a decent ROI.

I'd say that the key factors of whether mining is profitable or not are:

1. Your electricity costs.  Unfortunately, if you only have a small amount of money and are looking for 1-3 miners, you probably won't make any profit unless you are lucky enough to live in an area with cheap electricity.  Sometimes electricity costs can even exceed the revenue from your miners.  The only solution to this, if you're in it for the long run, is solar power but this will add a new level of risk to your mining.

2. Where you get your miners.  Bitmain is capable of being so profitable because not only do they sell miners, they own thousands of them and mine themselves.  Obviously you can't do this, but you can buy second hand and use other ways of attempting to get cheap miners.

3. Future difficulty.  In this case, you're at a fairly good point because you know that your profits will remain not consistent but nearly consistent for the next four years until the next halving.

In any case, mining is a risky venture and doing it on too small a budget, especially in an area with high electricity costs, is probably not a good idea.

I don't think it's good to have concentration in one country anyway.  It doesn't literally centralise Bitcoin as it's in the private sector, but this kind of monopolisation can never be good for something like Bitcoin that should be easy enough for anyone to take part in.

Plus, there's no chance China is going to ban Bitcoin.  They'll just loudly discuss it to try and bring the price down and buy a bit more, but they'll never actually do it.

Key ways of earning:

-Signature campaigns.  These are when you put an advertisement in your signature space on the forum and earn for making a certain number of posts on the forum, usually each week.  For people who are reasonably new, this is arguably the best way to get started making a smallish amount of Bitcoin to mess around and experiment with.  Don't make spammy posts for them though, or people won't like you and you might screw up the forum for others.  You might need to rank up to Junior Member or Member to begin participating in these, which could take a few weeks.

-Other forum related earnings e.g. selling old items on marketplace (you could even sell things for fiat and convert them to Bitcoin along with what you are already intending to put in.

-Ponzi schemes/HYIPs which often pay out for a while*

-Mining.  This is when you confirm others' transactions using specialised transactions for the reward of new Bitcoins and transaction fees*

-Trading Bitcoin with other cryptocurrencies on exchanges like Poloniex or Bitcoin to fiat currencies on exchanges like Bitstamp.  Before you do this, you will need to research the behavior of cryptocurrency markets and under no circumstances should you invest more than you can afford to lose, especially when you are less experienced.  If you decide to do this, don't expect to earn straight away - put in small amounts of Bitcoin first to test the behavior of the market and use your discretion.

-Hold.  This is the only choice which requires absolutely no work or skill, but for someone who is enthusiastic about cryptocurrencies you're probably interested in doing things.  Still, if you just buy and hold your Bitcoin for a long time, it will most likely go up over time as it is designed to do naturally.  You would make more money saving with Bitcoin than with fiat as long as you keep your Bitcoin as safe as possible.

I hope this helped, good luck on your endeavors.  If you want to check altcoins for trading you could use this service, if you want Bitcoin news you could use CoinDesk and if you want to understand the depths of Bitcoin, then the best way is just to look around on this forum and you'll see all the different topics being covered, as long as you're willing to look up and try to understand technical vocabulary.

*NOT RECOMMENDED

True.  Due to Bitcoin's mixed use I would consider it a kind of gateway investment - people often buy it with the intention of earning but are still likely to spend it and use it for other purposes, which is great - amateurs can get involved and find out how these things work, even trying it out with small amounts as in many ways it's very convenient.

The problem is that by suggesting that this is the best time to become a trader, it suggests that there could be a worst time to be a trader, and arguing that it's a bad time can just be an excuse for not bothering to find out more and get involved, which I believe Bitcoin can help you do.

While there are worse and better times to trade overall due to economic factors, there will always be a good investment to make - all you have to do is find it, and taking part and experimenting with small amounts will help people so much to understand how to get involved.

I do think that occasionally we see a kind of subconscious arrogance among less experienced investors who believe that they can "buy low, sell high".  What they don't realise is that not everyone can win and trading is never obvious because you can't just hold something forever in most cases - there will be drops and sometimes, if you're trading properly, you're going to have to lose money for individual trades.  Holding for too long can often hurt people's profits as well and trading is not an easy thing to do.

I would suggest that people who get involved need to avoid spending too much money to start off with and get to grips with the specific trade and with other business people before starting on any kind of semi-professional or professional level.

It's definitely partially that, but I think their main reasons were concerns with fraud and protecting the safety of their investors.

The reasons they gave are unfortunately based around the fundamental nature of Bitcoin which makes me less confident that they'll ever approve the ETF in the future.  They said "the rules of a national securities exchange [should] be designed to prevent fraudulent and manipulative acts and practices and to protect investors and the public interest".  They also noted that "those markets should be regulated".

To be honest, the chance of the scammers getting caught is pretty low.  That's why so many hackers try to steal Bitcoin - if they're good at it, it's pretty hard to track.

You're also unlikely to get your Bitcoins back because they would have to send them back to you.  However, what you can do is take precautions for the future:

1.  Make a new wallet.

2.  Go on to the "security center" of your new wallet, on the left.

3.  Take all the precautions that it suggests, especially enabling 2 factor authentication.  You should also block Tor users which Blockchain tries to do (a lot of hackers use Tor so this would make you a bit safer).

If you're serious and intend to hold a decent amount of Bitcoin, you should try a cold wallet or ideally even a hardware wallet.  Some people argue that if you hold your Bitcoin online it's never safe, and while it can be reasonably secure, to some extend they're right.

I'm not sure what you mean by "inside hand" but if you're suggesting that blockchain.info did it rest assured that they're legit.  You could have fell victim to a fake blockchain.info or phishing link.

You could also be infected by a virus, in which case you need to run reputable antivirus software and you still may not be 100% safe.

ETF rejected, the drop happened within minutes of that news being announced.  I don't think the delays on withdrawals would have caused that much of a drop as I would kind of have expected that to happen anyway - most investors predict when the odds are that strongly in favour of something.

Bitcoin withdrawal is also being delayed on all of the major exchanges but we have still seen an ATH during that period.  I don't think these short-term things have so much effect on the price.

It was never going to stay that high for long though, it was mainly just the hype for the ETF that brought it up so high in the first place, so it's fine to see it down to more natural levels (and if a natural drop now is still over $1000, Bitcoin couldn't be much stronger to be honest).  It was a little bubble, but we've seen now that Bitcoin is comfortable up here this time and it isn't just a pump like 2013.

Yep, the SEC is clearly doesn't think that Bitcoin is a viable investment due to its association with scams and money laundering.  This isn't something that can just be fixed, in their minds, overnight.

I haven't done mining before but as a musician, I know how annoying soundproofing can be.  You could try soundproofing foam which is pretty cheap or, if you're more serious (e.g. you have A LOT of miners), you could always try getting the room properly soundproofed by professionals, but this could often cost over $10,000 unless you do it yourself.  If you're any good at handywork you could try setting up two walls and filling the gap with sand, which is a more traditional way of doing it.

If your only argument is that you're allowed to do something you're clearly incapable of structuring a response.  Most people don't do stupid things just because they legally can.

All of your "references" are exactly the same thing which you have few to no credible citations for so it is not "trust information".

Your account may have not done scams before but your weak grasp of English, attempt to cover an entire page with information about corn silk and the fact that all of your previous posts that I've seen are spam as well, I have a pretty good indication that you're a scammer, or at the very least are misleading people about this.

It's also irrelevant whether you knew me before, because the whole point of the forum is the exchange of ideas and intelligent thought, most of which occurs between strangers.

The first thing you should try is ViaBTC's transaction accelerator.  It's a little crowded right now due to the high fees on the network, but it'll probably help to get your transaction through.  You could also try any other transaction accelerator which looks legit.

The transaction probably won't get confirmed on its own for a long time - under 10 satoshi per byte is too low for anything.  Other than transaction accelerators which can't work all the time or for everyone, there's no decent way to get your transaction through, but eventually if it doesn't get confirmed it should return to your wallet and you can resend with decent fees, as long as you're not in any hurry.

You're right, the forum shouldn't have to be responsible for people, if they choose a less trusted member for escrow and do not use their own discretion properly the forum can't be responsible, especially when the system can never 100% prevent scams anyway (the people who would pull off escrow scams that people actually lose money to would be quite clever anyway, I don't see them stopping at basic identity verification measures which could land the forum in trouble.

If people ask which escrows to go to or who is the most trusted, I tend to suggest going to the list of Bitcoin escrows which makes it clear who the most trustworthy escrows are and therefore distinguishes between likely scams and the most trusted community members for newbies who are less likely to know who trust.

True, but due to the nature of the private sector this is unlikely to actually happen.  As long as we use a currency which is trying to be decentralised and manages its transactions through rewards, many miners (especially the smaller ones) will continue to take these fees for themselves.

I don't even believe that Bitmain would have returned the fees if they didn't expect the miner to make the error public and potentially damage their image.

I don't think you quite understand what the ETF is.  If the ETF isn't approved, it doesn't mean that Bitcoin will be banned or that no one will use it, although if it is approved it might result in an increase in value which could improve Bitcoin's adoption as a currency in America.

The price went quite a bit higher a couple of days ago - I don't think the price has any chance of going exponential unless block size issues are resolved and the ETF is approved - this mix between a convenient deflationary currency for ordinary people and potential FOMO from rich investors could result in a huge surge.

Still, that's a sequence of scenarios which could possibly happen in the next few months, if we're lucky.

True but there might still be a long way ahead before the price and Bitcoin's adoption starts properly soaring.  Either BU or SegWit needs to be implemented or Bitcoin's use as a currency will suffer.  The ETF needs to be approved and, for this forum, the new forum needs to be implemented.  Then, there's no telling how far Bitcoin could go, especially with near-instant transactions and the fact that it deflates by nature.

True.  Bitcoin is quite a complicated asset due to its use as a currency and the fact that it is not backed up by anything physical.  Its purpose will never be exactly the same as gold and rightly so - it is not a stable store of value so much as an investment (and a currency).

The assumptions you make in this post are also quite weak.  Even if Bitcoin was being used as a stable asset, that wouldn't inherently result in gold prices matching it by any means - gold prices might well fall well below in that scenario, or stay high due to its sentimental value.