it depends on what is going to happen in the following weeks.

if the support for Segwit stays up and it activates smoothly then you don't even have to think about things like this. there won't be a split and you simply continue using as you were before.
and this has a high chance of happening.

if the support drops for some weird reason or there is a split then they say don't make any transactions by that date because of what is called "replay" and the fact that you may lose your coins on one chain not lose your coins entirely or bitcoin vanishes as a whole system!!. you can read the topic in beginners board written by theymos.
this has a low chance of happening by the way.

i don't think there is any country that you can find bitcoin to be cheap in because everyone who is selling bitcoin has bought it at some market and there you can only find market price and you would be an idiot to sell lower.

but there must be more countries with higher price for bitcoin. the only place that i know for sure that has higher price is India which always had bitcoin at ~$500 above market rate.
and probably developing countries with no exchange or no access to USD exchanges for instance will have higher prices.

"LUNATICS" are everywhere and they have been around in bitcoin world for as long as i can remember. and they have been making topics like what you linked for as long as bitcoin history goes.

they think we forget but you can always go to the old pages (currently 890 pages in this board) and see them try to spread FUD each time there is a dip to push the price lower.

and each time they just fool a couple of newbie weak hands and never succeed in anything.

you are asking a couple of different questions.
a platform that lists all the altcoins, (and based on your last statement) all the new coins that are released everyday is a shitty exchange. and it is called Yobit. it is not at all trusted! because you need to vet the coins you add first.

cryptopia is actually a good place, the owner seems to be serious enough and will do what they believe in. for example they removed ethereum from their platform and kept it like that because they had pretty good reasons and stuck to them even with all the high volume and their users asking them to.

but if you want a big exchange with high liquidity and a more trusted exchange then use poloniex or bittrex.
and if support is important to you then know that polo support sucks.

first sign up on one of the good exchanges such as poloniex or bittrex and then choose the coin you want to invest in and do it.
the first step is easy, you just check the platform and check their rules and if you liked it you sign up.
the second step however is where things get complicated. you need to choose wisely not based on emotions. find the things that can lead to a price rise and try to speculate the future of each coin.
and most important of all, don't trust anyone. specially those who are saying buy .... most of them are doing it for their own benefits

first why did you post this in the altcoin board?!
second these articles are old.

right now the bitcoin unlimited still has the same ~40% support but SegWit support has gone up to nearly 50% from the initial 30ish%

also there is a new thing called SegWit2x which currently has more than 90% support. and if it goes smoothly it can activate the SegWit part on August first without any problems!

what is this August 1 "hard fork" you are talking about? there is no hard fork there.
there is only a Soft Fork planned on that date and only if it gains enough support and so far it doesn't.

there is also one thing wrongly named Hard Fork which is a joke and mostly a public stunt by bitmain and it is irrelevant.

most of these people who are arguing are either idiots who don't understand what is going on and just love to argue and win an argument to feel good or they are shills doing this for some hidden agenda and in order to create chaos.
some are even altcoin pumpers who think they can gain some foothold if they harm bitcoin.

Creating a double spend is not hard at all ...
[/quote]

i said performing a successful double spend not  creating one.
it is like saying i can easily use a stolen credit card to withdraw money from an ATM.
yeah you can do that but is it easy to perform and not get caught?

not that much. i always gamble with the amount that i can afford to lose and that amount is also always a portion of my earning so i am still comfortable even with price rise.

no because it is a very unreliable altcoin in my opinion regarding the price and also the network. so i always prefer to keep my ethers on exchanges to be able to dump them as fast as possible and in case i see a pump coming to buy just as fast too.

and if i want to use an altcoin for gambling i would use something that is cheap and has a more stable price and a low fee. a coin such as Doge coin.

you know performing a  successful double spend is not at all easy. and also as i have said many times, there are easy ways of figuring out the risks of a payment.
i have spoken with a couple of services, and they usually use the blockcypher's confidence factor and it has a pretty good description in its documents. it easily and with a good accuracy of >99% tells the businesses if there is a risk or not and how much that risk is.

and for example in case the fees were small the "hamburger joint" can simply deny the payment and ask the payer to increase it.

because of all the roadblocks and because of all the weak hands who only are in bitcoin for the fiat profit and nothing else.

the road blocks are the Mt goxes and all the drama such as FUD about fork, FUD about bitcoin in general and all kinds of crap.
and you think people are seeing bitcoin's potential and some of them may think it themselves too but in fact what happens is that as soon as there is a rise they panic and think this is the end and sell. this is actually why there aren't that many millionaires in the news but a handful of them! because only a handful kept their coins and didn't sell on each small rise.

offline aka cold storage: http://docs.electrum.org/en/latest/coldstorage.html

two things you need to back uo
1. seed: http://docs.electrum.org/en/latest/faq.html#what-is-the-seed
2. wallet file: http://docs.electrum.org/en/latest/faq.html#where-is-my-wallet-file-located

you can and should write down the seed on piece of paper.

wow, that is OLD
be careful when upgrading. make sure to back up your wallet file and seed first and also read this link: http://docs.electrum.org/en/latest/faq.html#how-to-upgrade-electrum
then upgrade. the wallet has changed since version 1.x and you may encounter some troubles. so it is best to have these 2 backups just in case.


SEED is the only thing you need.
private keys can also be found if you right click on each address in address tab (which is visible by default in version 1.6) and click private keys. or from the menu use export pivate keys under the wallet link.

that guy, Thomas Voegtlin, is the developer of Electrum
and splitting coins means only in case two chains coexist. but in case in the future any fork regarding scaling happens and only one chain exists in the end, you don't have to do anything at all.

you can always run a live linux quickly and do these steps.

and i believe they have added new features in the newer versions and also the 2.9 is coming which will have additional features. and won't need command line.
i really haven't checked this much. read here: https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/blob/master/RELEASE-NOTES#L1-L6
2.9 is NOT released yet.


you have 2 options:
1. wait it out. just do nothing. don't touch the coins, don't try to sell or anything and wait to see what happens and after a while when things became clear start again.
2. sell from a small portion to all your coins until you are left with a more comfortable number. for example if you have 10,000BTC and you are nervous then sell 6,000BTC and hold 4,000BTC to feel more comfortable

whether selling is better or not, i can not tell you. sorry!

if you want to do a fair comparison then you should compare EVERYTHING not just one factor that you like or the factor that you think is better.

a true comparison is like this:
has bitcoin ever failed to perform as it should?
the answer is NO. bitcoin has always been performing well, and the spam attack and the large number of unconfirmed transactions only causes fees to go higher.

has ethereum ever failed to perform as it should?
the answer is YES.
about two weeks ago etherum blockchain was congested to a point where you could no longer use it.
- software shut the wallets off to prevent any more transactions to be sent to the congested network
- no more transactions could be sent out
- if any transaction were sent at that point meant a lost transaction.
- this was a global ethereum blockchain issue which meant all the other ones relying on it were also failing
- all exchanges were forced to shut down all the deposits and withdrawals for at least a week.

here is an example:
Bittrex announcement to shut down ethereum
Ethereum Network is so Congested Exchanges Are Forced to Disable ETH Wallets
Ethereum Blockchain Congestion! Price crash incoming

in short it means nothing to have 1 TPS or 1000000 TPS when you can not handle either of them.

This explains most things that you need to know: http://docs.electrum.org/en/latest/hardfork.html

no there is nothing true about this. and the user posting these topics all over the forum thinks if he creates a pretty pictures with arrows going up and down then people will believe what he says.

and in this case he most probably is bag holding some syscoin and that is why he is comparing litecoin with it!

besides if you read the replies to that topic you can already see everyone is laughing at what he said!

p.s. i don't know when people are going to realize these methods of hyping altcoins no longer works...

it wasn't exactly the original reason. Silk Road played some part in one of the many price rises throughout the history of bitcoin and that part wasn't even the biggest part of all.

and also currently there are a lot more usages for bitcoin that any kind of usage of bitcoin in silk road or any other dark places of the internet is nothing in comparison.

and again also as some other user said, the days of people thinking bitcoin is anonymous are over. the awareness has increased and on top of that there are many good anonymous coins such as XMR which are being used. and that decreased the usage of bitcoin in silk road a lot.

this "law" that you are so happy about is enforced through something called consensus in a decentralized network like bitcoin. and when this consensus is reached it means the majority of the network has accepted that new "law" and you need to respect that.

creating dumb memes won't change anything about it.

and if you are unhappy about how things work in bitcoin, there are centralized altcoins that can work to your liking with one person making all the decisions and the network follows him. you can switch to those altcoins.

1,000,000,000 Won = $875,853.23 = ~330BTC

this is not even in the top 20 exchange hacks in the history of bitcoin
this is more like the amount that some whales lose if they have a bad trading day...