this may sound too obvious but you'd be surprised how many people are caught with their pants down later on because unknowingly did something wrong. do a test recovery yourself and see if things work! try decrypting what you encrypted before, import the seed, try seeing if you can get the same addresses,... and see if it actually works. I have seen people that wanted to recover their seed (even the not encrypted one) and be unable to because they wrote down a word wrong.

I also like the letter punch idea posted above, basically any form of engraving letters on metal. just remember to encrypt it first.

the fear has always existed among newbies and it has always been a hot topic of discussion. it is nothing new that you are seeing a heated discussion about it among them. the rest of us don't share that irrational fear about bitcoin price drops. there is always a risk/reward ratio when it comes to everything including bitcoin and at this point the reward is a lot higher than the risk because of the fact that bitcoin price is currently in a big dip and is the result of a huge decline in price (about 80%) and that is a good buy signal for many investors and a little more drop is not going to change this fact.

I am not sure how localbitcoins platform works since I have not really used it in my life but these offers seems to be the "best offers" on their platform not the "safest" offers. for example it may be some scammers among them, someone with no history or something like that. you may say "escrow" but people always find a way to abuse anything so I wouldn't be so sure about that either specially with the charge backs that happen when it comes to fiat.

in my experience whenever there is a price difference that offers arbitrage opportunities, someone is already doing it and it won't last and if the opportunity is around for a moderate amount of time then it means it is a fake opportunity meaning something is wrong at the heart of it that makes it unprofitable.

this event which people are now calling "proof of keys" should be your motto every day that you are using bitcoin or any other truly decentralized currency like bitcoin. you shouldn't just find out about it and do it once per  year just because someone on the internet encouraged you to do it.

so my answer is both yes and no. yes in the sense that I always try to maintain control of my own private keys, no in the sense that I didn't do it because of this.

every year is a critical year for bitcoin, 2019 is not an exception.
were constantly in a battle for adoption and growth and while it is going to happen, it sometimes is slowed down because of the roadblocks.

decision on ETF is not important anymore. unless it is approved it will change nothing. at this point it is like saying people are waiting for the sun to come up in the morning! they all know the  sun is going to come up in the morning if it doesn't come up then they will be surprised. and it is like that, SEC will reject ETF and if they approve it then it is going to be news.

who are you again?

I think you are stuck in the mentality of Mid 2018 like around April to June

mining will ALWAYS be profitable no matter when in time we are talking about, no matter what bitcoin price is and no matter what the block reward is.
it is all because of how the difficulty works. it is designed in a wise enough way that it adjusts itself based on the hashrate. so if by 2029 the hashrate is higher and the price is lower then some miners would leave and make it balanced again so that it becomes profitable again. or if the price is higher and the hashrate is lower then there will be more miners joining in to balance the excess profit and make it normal again.

RBI stands for Reserve Bank of India, I think it is something like the central bank which is a big deal over in India. so it is not a "random person's opinion" as you may think it is and it is important specially since they have been putting roadblocks in front of bitcoin's adoption in India.
although it is not the government decision or the law but it still is something. we have to see what the real statement is though, not what OP is saying without a reference.

it doesn't have to be always like this and it won't last long either. as price becomes more stable or even during the volatility years when the drops happen they make the pure speculators leave the market and only those who care about the "product" remain back.
besides it doesn't have to ONLY be one or the other. it can be both. for example you may want the financial sovereignty that bitcoin and its decentralization offer you but at the same time you want the profit that it gives you too because you are still living in a world that fiat is dominant.

have you checked out what the "fee" rules are on localbitcoins.com?
I am not using this platform but there is always a lot of fees involved with platforms such as localbitcoins. there is an escrow fee and there is a withdrawal fee which can eat through a small amount although it shouldn't be as high as $120
https://localbitcoins.com/fees

make sure that the values you are seeing are in bitcoin not in something like mBTC or uBTC and you aren't missing a couple of 0s

why? it is so simple. bitcoin has been around about 10 years while Gold and USD has been around for a much longer time (USD from 1862 or 157 years and gold is about7000 years ago). in other words you are comparing a toddler with an ancient and you are expecting this toddler to beat that strong ancient in an arm wrestle!!!

not to mention that you don't see people constantly (as in 24/7) spread FUD about gold and USD even though you can find a lot of corruption in both of them specially in US dollar! for example when was the last time you heard a gigantic bank or a big market player call US government fraudulent? the answer is never. but you hear JPMorgan call bitcoin a fraud and other names almost every week
you can't expect bitcoin mass adoption to happen "fast" when there is this much opposing force against it trying to slow it down.

this is an important matter that most people usually forget. bitcoin adoption has been extremely small so far. they look at the price and see a "big rise" and think that is it! but they forget that the adoption has been less than 1% so far and that is extremely low, and that gives bitcoin one of its potentials for big rises. as this percentage grows the price continues shooting up and each time it dwarfs the previous ATHs.

you should always have that fear as long as your coins are on an online computer instead of being in a cold storage stored offline. and it is not just about electrum but about any other wallet that you may be using which is online. your computer can be infected easily and your coins can be lost.

in this case however the servers can only see your addresses because that is what you send them and nothing more. and this case here was only a feature that was being exploited by the scammer to mislead people into going to his malicious links and fooled them into downloading a fake wallet. so all you had to do was to not follow that link blindly!

we are getting closer to that point where there is no room left to go any lower. bitcoin is currently extremely oversold and that has made it enter an undervalued state and that means the current price is an artificially low one and as soon as the sell pressure that is put there by manipulators to keep the price suppressed is removed the price will shoot up.
we have seen this hundreds of times already, where manipulation keeps the price down and then all of a sudden we see a big spike happening with a big green candle on the charts followed by every newbie crying about how they "missed the lows" and wish they acted differently.

a couple of the cases reported here weren't the usual "bitcoin is dead" bullshit that they always spread, they are a new breed that are actually calling bitcoin dead while advertising bitcoin-cash instead of it and pretend it is going to replace bitcoin. in other words many of these "died cases" are an advertisement for an altcoin.

as for CCN, they are the funniest news website in my opinion. one day price goes from $6100 to $6150 and the articles there all shift towards reporting how bitcoin is soaring and how this is bullish and the next day price goes from $6150 to $6100 and they start talking about how bitcoin is in a slump and quote those who said it is dead
this was the story prior to the drop below $6k, I no longer see much of their articles since they got boring after a while.


^^ an excellent point.

this is exactly why I stopped being excited about things such as futures, ETFs, SEC regulations,... the more we stay away from any kind of government, banks, big moneyZ involvement in bitcoin the better. specially in the early stages of bitcoin which has a pretty susceptible market because of the small size of it. maybe in a couple of years with more market maturity we can handle the mess they are going to bring with them but not now.

bitcoin is Proof of Work not Proof of Stake, if it was PoS then what you said about taking the power back from these Legacy financial institutions would have been true because they could affect the network with their large stake that was given to them by their users.
and price is not something that a single exchange can affect only by having a large amount of deposited bitcoins. the days of MtGox are long gone when they controlled more than 85% of the volume. nowadays you would be lucky to get anything close to 10% of the total volume and with that you can't manipulate anything. not to mention that there are already so many whales manipulating the price that exchanges are lost among them.

that is always going to be the problem with regulations. specially new ones for a brand new technology such as bitcoin. lack of information, and lack of truly informed people. and in the end the regulations can either be a terrible restrictive one or a friendly one that actually helps the adoption.
you can see in different countries there are a lot of different approaches from outright banning bitcoin to adopting it with open arms as a legal currency.

in the end I think it is an evolving thing. it may start out terrible at first but it doesn't have to be the end of the world. with enough persistence it can be changed.

the bitcoin rises (growth) has always been fast and will remain that way for a long time simply because of how the adoption works in addition to all the roadblocks that are being placed in front of adoption. each time one of them is broken into (like an FUD being debunked,... ) there is a surge of adoption which leads to a big price rise which most of the times surprises people because they can't explain it.

I don't know if this was asked before but I was wondering whether I can activate multiple options from the "rewards" tab. for example 2x 1000% bonuses at the same time or 1x 1000% bonus + 1x lottery ticket bonus?
also what does the "Link" button do, clicking it doesn't do anything?

I see you are only trading bitcoin with tether so far, is that the only plan for the whole year or will you enter altcoin trading too? because based on that the result can be very different. it can be a lot higher than the goal that you have currently set or it can be a lot lower than your current balance depending on how capable you are of riding the pump and dump waves in the chaotic altcoin ocean (market)!

this is an encouraging act though, keep it up and good luck.