By amazing coincidence, yesterday I won the lottery and found a unicorn. Can any one top this?

Back in the real world - having problems with withdrawals being cancelled and auto-reinvested? You can't stop auto-reinvest being turned on, but you can limit the damage:

Quoted! I'd suggest checking you can sign with it - if you can't sign with it (for example, Xapo addresses can't be used for signing) it's better to find that out now rather than when you need to prove you own your account.

My emphasis. And while Localbitcoins is great, it's by no means the only OTC venue out there, and other posters had already mentioned it (I have this crazy idea that posts should add to the discussion, not repeat what another poster has already said).

I've just read the FAQ and I think suchmoon summed it up nicely: incomprehensible bullshit. It looks like they (or "RDP" on their behalf) choose the algorithm (SHA-256, scrypt, etc) for us, so we don't need to bother our pretty little heads with difficult learning about ever-so complex mining stuff, or tricky calculations that might show how badly we've lost out due to their algo's decisions.

It depends what they're trading. BTC, BTC/USD - sure. BTC derivatives, not so much. Some people expect volatility, and there are traders who are only too happy to sell to them and make a profit from a lack of volatility.

Not necessarily disagreeing with your conclusion, but... last year was just one year out of six. The previous Christmas (2013) saw a run-up to an ATH, December 2012 was relatively flat before a run-up started in January 2013 leading to the April/May 2013 ATH, December 2011 we were in the middle of a rise (though well down from the June 2011 ATH), and December 2010 marked the start of a rise (to a short-lived ATH around 50c, that preceded the June 2011 ATH where we hit $10 for the first time).

Kind of.

At least, if I have a bad feeling about a possible trade I won't open a position. I'd rather miss an opportunity than lose actual money.

Once I've opened a position I'll already know what the possible outcomes are, and I'll have a plan for those outcomes, and I'll stick to the plan. I've learned the hard way that making up new plans on the fly is an easy way to lose money - I guess this would be trading off emotions, and it's not profitable! (Well, it's not profitable for me).

I guess emotions could cloud my judgement when I'm analysing and planning, though. That's difficult to avoid completely.

I think the concern is more that people may not be able to sign when they need to. Xapo addresses can't be signed, for example. Better to find out you can't sign an address before it's too late!

I suspect you're one of very few people who are excited by this, but if you wanted you could try and arbitrage the difference - buy BTC at Bitstamp and then sell them at whatever Chinese exchange you're looking at for a small profit.

I don't know when it'll double, but it'll next change in 344 blocks. bitcoin.sipa.be tracks difficulty changes, hashpower, etc, so might be useful for roughly predicting when difficulty will be twice what it is now. I tend to use bitcoincharts.com for a number of other things, but it also tells us when the next difficulty change should be (look for "Difficulty" - the next change is then shown underneath it as "Estimated").

That's right - difficulty changes and block reward changes are different things, but related.

Difficulty changes every 2016 blocks - approximately every two weeks. The block reward changes every 210000 blocks - roughly every four years.

It's the date forecast for the next halving of the block reward

Meh, I'd put that down to well within what I'd expect to see from FX fluctuations and the usual gaps between exchanges. Stamp was a good 2-3 dollars from Bitfinex for a several days last week - and that's with no FX to take into account.

I'm not seeing any evidence of dumping, hard or otherwise - could you post a graph (BitcoinCharts.com are handy for that) showing what you're seeing?

Don't know about any $5 difference - could it just be exchange rate fluctuations? CNY is a lot more mobile these days, and USD is down slightly against CNY.

Did you mean to say "if you eat more than six, can it kill you ??" ?

This seems like a partial solution to auto-reinvest being "accidentally" reenabled. Obviously it still means your withdrawal is cancelled, but at least you've still got your money. (Or some very, very cheap hash):

We know that the block reward will decrease from 25 to 12.5 BTC per block, and it's reasonable to assume that rational miners not only also know this, but have factored it into their ROI calculations.

We know what the new supply of BTC will be each block - it'll be 12.5 after the block reward halves. What we don't know, but can attempt to extrapolate from current data, is non-new supply - long-term holders (for example) converting BTC to fiat, the vendor of those exciting new ACME widgets (which are only sold for BTC) needing to convert BTC to fiat to pay their suppliers, short-term speculators needing to close long positions, etc. We also don't know - but can attempt to extrapolate, guess, whatever - what demand will be like (people buying ACME widgets will create demand, etc).

tl;dr - it's all down to supply and demand. Do your best to calculate what will happen to supply after the halving, and to demand after the halving, and you have as good an answer as anybody else! Anything else is just noise, people's wild-assed guesses, predictions based on something that happened once before, etc.

Agreed. It was an official referendum in Scotland, and - although the Catalan government wanted an official referendum - this one isn't official. With Scotland the UK government had participated in part of the process (determining how to do it all legally, agreeing the wording of the referendum question, etc). I think what this referendum mayachieve - assuming a Sí vote - for Catalonia is getting the Spanish government to the same place the UK government were a few years ago.

In both cases, though, EU membership and adopting/keeping the Euro were/are argued about by the opposing sides. This article is a fairly typical example from during the Scottish referendum campaign - the Yes and No camps are debating comments made by the EC President about Catalonia and EU membership, for example.

To warn people who don't have your knowledge. For people who haven't yet managed to recover their money to discuss tips and tricks for getting (some or all of) their money back. To discuss legal avenues for getting the site shut down.

If you're using Unix or a Unix-like OS (OSX, Linux, BSD, etc) then "cut". Something like...

(ConcATenate NAME_OF_FILE, piping the result into CUT, and selecting only the third field)

That's from memory, you might need to specify the delimiter, and you'll need to either remove the first line, ignore it somehow, of maybe cut on your OS has a "specify that the first line is a header line". It's non-destructive, though, so even if it doesn't work it won't do any damage and you can play around with it until it works as you need.

If you're on Windows there's probably a similar cmd.exe or Powershell spell you can use. Or you could install Cygwin and use "cut" (and other POSIX tools) on Windows.