There is new populistic Government in Italy.
Itay is going to dump Euro and it will cause huge turmoil in Europe. New parallel currency will be in circulation and Euro accounts might be closed for owners. That will cause surge in Bitcoin prices like in the case of Cypres in 2013.

Known Bitcoin issues such as transaction cost and speed make inconvenience with cryptocurrency usage, for instance, to make sure that our transaction valid we need to wait at least an hour, also if take into account that transaction fee quite expensive, there is no sense to use Bitcoin to buy a coffee or for another retail purpose. But seems like this issue was resolved with Lightning Network above Bitcoin, now it could have the transaction throughput as Visa (previously bitcoin was in thousand times slower than visa). In addition to Lightning Network very promising looks NFC for bitcoin. So, in nearest future will be developed applications which will have a user experience similar to Apple Pay but for Bitcoin. As a summary, Lightning Network and NFC could significantly increase the number of bitcoin transactions in retail.
But together with this great opportunity, we have another news which does not look so promising, media says Bitcoin mining could use 0.5% of world’s electrical energy in 2018. It is the huge number and it warms the planet a lot. So time to think about consensus algorithm update, yes, it is not easy, not only because of HardFork will be required, but in terms of interests inside bitcoin community, there are a lot who are interesting to keep mining. But warming the planet, not an option at all. As a good example, Ethereum is on the way from PoW to PoS and they are going to accept potential risks with a hard fork.
As an option, Bitcoin may introduce retail market entrance and consensus algorithm at the same time and it could mitigate hard fork risk.

The evolution of CoinDesk's annual Consensus conference mirrors the changing makeup of the cryptocurrency and blockchain community.

The inaugural 2015 event's 500 attendees were dominated by true believers in bitcoin, along with its subversive goal of replacing fiat currency and traditional banking  - though, with Citibank as a sponsor and many bankers present, the conference was also a modest blockchain baptism for the financial establishment.

By contrast, last week's fourth installment boasted 7,500 attendees, from 104 different countries and captures a full cross-section of the economy that includes everyone from automobile makers and insurance companies to government agencies and even a fast food chain.

Expansion has come at the cost of cohesiveness. This big-tent community is gripped with internal divisions that are both baffling and off-putting to outsiders.

Permissionless" cryptocurrency purists accuse established enterprises of co-opting the technology to produce watered down blockchain models that protect their incumbency. For their part, the enterprises critique the early adopters as naïve idealists whose complex solutions are impractical in the real world.

Further, within the purist crypto sub-community itself, there are internecine battles among proponents of different visions of bitcoin while fierce competition rages between so-called "altcoins," whether ethereum, XRP, EOS or hundreds more.

Accusations of scams and personal attacks against different developers are rife on "crypto Twitter," a social media setting that's now synonymous with derision, bitterness and ad hominem attacks.

This conflict is unavoidable. It's even helpful, to the extent that it compels developers to improve their projects' code.

But with the Securities and Exchange Commission and other regulators considering a more draconian stance against cryptocurrency and blockchain projects, a more united front among all who believe in this technology's sweeping potential could help ensure a more constructive legal environment for its development

How do you think about this news ?

Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin were designed to be efficient, low-friction alternatives to traditional financial systems. But it seems their creators maybe didn’t think too hard about their sustainability.

An analysis published in the journal Joule this week predicts the Bitcoin network could be using 7.67 gigawatts of electricity by the end of the year. That’s half a percent of the world’s electricity and the same amount used by the whole of Austria.

The problem comes from the way Bitcoin verifies transactions. To avoid duplicate spending of coins, members of the network compete in tricky computational challenges for the right to create the next block of transactions in the chain in return for a reward—currently 12.5 bitcoins (roughly $10,000).

But solving these challenges—a process known as “mining”—requires you to run high-powered computers nearly continuously, which uses a lot of electricity. The paper’s author, economist Alex de Vries, estimates a single transaction uses the same amount of energy as an average household in the Netherlands uses in a month.

To add to the problem, the mining challenges are getting harder, forcing miners to invest ever more power-hungry hardware. That’s because the network self-regulates to keep the rate of new blocks constant at around 1 every 10 minutes by increasing the difficulty of the calculations depending on the total computational power of the network.

This combines to create a situation where the energy use of the system can only really go one way—at least until the cost of mining bitcoins reaches equilibrium with the cost of the electricity and hardware required to do so.

The 7.67 GW figure is actually de Vries’ estimate for when this equilibrium will be reached, something he says could happen this year. But it’s worth noting that his estimates are based on some pretty big assumptions.

De Vries based his estimates on the energy usage of the Antiminer S9, the top-of-the-range specialized mining chip produced by market leader Bitmain. He then assumed a 1–2 year lifetime for these chips, an average electricity cost of 5 US cents per kWh, and a production cost of $500, based on estimates from a bitcoin developer.

He used these figures to work out what percentage of the lifetime cost of the chips went to electricity, coming to a ballpark figure of 60 percent after hedging for the uncertainty around the chips’ lifetimes. By combining this figure, his assumed electricity cost, and the value of Bitcoin mined on March 16 of this year, he reached his figure for equilibrium.

The reason he thinks we could reach this equilibrium point in 2018 is based on the fact that the number of Antiminers due to be produced this year would have a combined electricity consumption of 8.92 GW, so there should be enough devices to make it possible.

That’s a lot of assumptions, and the model relies on both the price of electricity and bitcoin staying the same until the end of the year, which the last 12 months suggests is unlikely. Marc Bevand, a bitcoin investor and entrepreneur who has also made efforts to forecast Bitcoin’s energy usage, pointed out to Gizmodo that de Vries’ estimate also assumes Bitmain is selling its chips at cost, which gives miners much more money to spend on electricity.

Stanford University energy economist Jonathan Koomey criticized previous estimates made by de Vries on his Digiconomist blog using a similar approach, because he said basing the analysis on estimates about manufacturers’ costs and revenues introduced lots of opportunity for error and uncertainty.

But with no publicly-available data on energy consumption from the miners themselves, making unambiguous claims about the electricity use of these networks is hard. Indeed, de Vries admits that there’s plenty of scope for disagreement, but he says it’s important to start doing these calculations now so we can start to think about the policy implications of Bitcoin’s energy use.

“We don’t really have a common approach to getting to a future estimate of electricity consumption right now, which is why I am hoping to get this conversation started,” he said in a press release. “I’m doing this research, but a lot of people should be doing it.”

It’s not all a one-way street. The problems around Bitcoin’s energy consumption have been known for a while, and there are efforts underway to deal with the problem.

There are various proposals for more energy-efficient alternatives to the pointless computation used to verify transactions. Most notable is an approach currently being considered by the second-biggest cryptocurrency, Ethereum, that bases decisions on who makes the next block using a lottery, with your chances of winning based on how many coins you have.

Companies like Bitmain are also working on ever more efficient mining chips, and as demand goes up you can expect bigger players to pile in with their expertise too. Intel recently applied for a patent on a high-efficiency specialized Bitcoin mining chip.

But it is worth noting that another Bitcoin boom like the one experienced at the end of last year would see that point of equilibrium shift far higher, incentivizing even greater electricity use.

While we shouldn’t take the figures from de Vries’ analysis as gospel, they are a useful reality check for anyone assuming that cryptocurrencies, at least in their current form, are the future of our financial system.

There are some banks which are already using protocols like Ripple to take the advantage of it. On the other hand, some banks are working to adopt blockchain technology to optimize their services. However, even in that case, banks won't give the control to others so, in other words, they are not allowing us to participate even if we are keeping our money in banks and that's against the core ideology of decentralization.

Undoubtedly bank will soon partner with cryptocurrency, I think some banks have been collecting Ripple.some banks are working to adopt blockchain technology to optimize their services.

LG is one of the world's major electronics manufacturer and this is a great move, considering the fact that they have a huge customer base all over the world. If they decide to have an ICO this year, I am sure they will attract quite a good number of investors. I see it as success in making.

....
I'm active on another forum where you can't edit your posts after 1 hour nor can you delete them
...

...
I don't know but I think that asking a simple question before every post for newbies could be better than asking it upon registration.

Example of questions : who created Bitcoin? Who created merit in bitcointalk? Complete the missing letter in bitcoi*talk. The minimum merit required to be a full member? And so on, simple questions for every post until the user becomes a junior or a member.

That's actually why banks will never die - they are the main instrument of taking loans which are needed for businesses and ordinary people.
Personally I don't know any institution that would give you a loan in BTC. There is a separate thread on bitcointalk.org dedicated to lending BTC or getting loans of BTC but this doesn't seem to be very reliable.

a condition in which more than half the computing power in a cryptocurrency network is controlled by a single group of miners. With the computing power possessed by the group in theory will enable them to become an authority within the network. This means that every client in the network will trust the transaction block that is the result of the group hash process (attacker). This condition will give the group control over the network, including the ability to:

-Transaction issues conflict with the property of others.
-Stopping other people's transactions can not be confirmed.
-Spend the same coins repeatedly.
-Prevent other miners from mining legitimate blocks.

...
 It's an insane incentive, and indeed, it would be good if the forum limits access to those boards to higher ranks only. But if that happens, they'll start spamming other boards to gain activity. Letting them spam the bounty boards is the lesser evil choice.

I tried nuking him but it says that the 'user is protected' for some reason. Banned him but still going to take some time to remove all the posts manually.

the services such as Coinbase offer some services that people want. for example the ability to buy and sell bitcoin with fiat from many different countries, or trading in their other website (GDAX). it is also an easy to use wallet for newbies to possibly start things and learn first before moving on to a desktop wallet.
there is also the services they are offering merchants  as a payment processor (similar to BitPay) where a merchant can ask their customer to go through Coinbase and make the payment there and Coinbase then pays the merchant in bitcoin or  fiat automatically.

Coinbase offers several services that people want. such as the ability to buy and sell bitcoin with fiat from different countries, or trade on their other websites (GDAX). It's also an easy-to-use wallet for beginners to get started and learn first before switching to the desktop wallet.

Its easy to find out whether a post is plagiarized or not,either by searching up in google or using a plagiarism checker: https://edubirdie.com/plagiarism-checker
....

....
 I think the only solution to that is to remove signatures completely for below Member rank.

...
Why Goverment  is not recommending to use  digital currency such a bitcoin? Because the government cannot controll it over. The government doubts the digital currency will be used illegal activities.

...
Why Goverment  is not recommending to use  digital currency such a bitcoin, because The government cannot control bitcoin over. The goverment afraid bitcoin can be used illegal activities.