I am not saying this cannot happen, but I think after reading the whole discussion it became clear that this was just FUD and not true at all. Yes, there are certainly people doing this and I think it is highly unethical to manipulate the market at the expense of others, but I think most people would do this, if they had the resources to do this.

Would you ignore a $15 000 000 payday for 90 minutes of work? <Most people work their whole life and never accumulate that kind of money> 

Can you still keep track on how much income you are going to get from the Lamborghini draw, if you constantly add new ways of earning entries to the draw? <Like the latest free tickets for deposits?>

You already said that you cannot calculate the amount of actual tickets that are being bought, because a lot of tickets that are bought are coming from referral income that are paid by your site. 

Are you just looking at the total monthly profit to see what influence this draw has on the overall income of the site?

It's all a bunch of smoke screens and political nonsense that are created to fluff and hype traditional investment options. Even a blind man can see that these investment options are well overdue for a massive correction, but the Bankers and the government wants to create the impression that there are nothing wrong with traditional investments to artificially stimulate the global economy. 

I prefer to have some investments like Crypto currencies that are not linked to all of this BS, where the value is derived from open markets. 

 

I think the introduction of the Lightning Network and the removal of millions of micro transactions to a off-chain solution has already contributed to a massive reduction in the amount of transactions that had to be done on-chain, so that is a solution on it's own. 

Governments could even tax large mining farms with additional CO2 taxes to create special income for them to help fight the CO2 pollution, like they did with the CO2 taxes on new cars. <This money could be used to fund more environmental friendly energy solutions to generate "clean" power to be used for mining> 

I think many churches might have some issues with fact that you cannot track the origin of some of the money that are donated, when you use Crypto currencies. It might happen that a person running some Paedophile network, donated some money from their income to the church and this could lead to an embarrassing situation when this comes to light. 

I know some churches do not want to accept money donated from professional gamblers for instance, because gambling is not an acceptable practice in some churches. 

1. The weak code being used by centralized exchange services are not Bitcoin's fault. Each of these services has a responsibility towards their own customers to protect them with secure software.

2. We have 3rd party services like Bitcoin mixers that can be used to add a little extra financial privacy. 

3. All markets/commodities/stocks and shares are manipulated in some way, so this is not unique to Bitcoin or Crypto currencies. Just accept. 

Criminals find new ways to scam people out of their money, so there are no specific rules that would prevent you from losing coins. We have even seen some 2FA getting hacked, so using that as a "must have" option is not 100% bulletproof.

I distribute my coins over several storing methods to reduce the risk of losing all my coins from one hack or scam or some exploit. People make the mistake of storing all their coins in one wallet and then they lose all their coins in one bad event. 

I do the same thing with my other investments. <Diversify and use different financial institutions> 

"Bitcoin is borderless" and this is one of the reasons why I hoard it for a day that may come when I have to quickly leave the country and escape with my wealth. I live in a country with a lot of political instability and hatred and also a corrupt government, so I need some currency that would allow me to relocate to a another country, when the shit hits the fan in my country of origin. 

Physical Gold can be used to a limited degree, but it is not practical as OP has stated. I once tried to go on holiday with a few Gold rings and jewellery that I wanted to sell and it turned out bad, because it draw too much attention from customs.    <I was only allowed to take out a limited amount of money> 

Satoshi developed a near flawless technology, but he might not have envisioned that the thing he wanted to disrupt <Banks> would use this same technology to improve their own systems and even counter his attempts to disrupt their monopoly.

Yes, their versions of this technology will not be the same and the fundamental difference will be centralized control, but normal people might not be able to spot the difference and that would be their downfall. <Learn to spot the mistakes from the past and do not repeat it> 

I do not agree when we run out of precious metals that this would lead to mass killings like he said. People will just move to the next mineral or goods that has a limited supply. <This can be sea shells or marbles for that matter> 

We also see when something of a limited supply gets exhausted, people are motivated to find a replacement or a alternative for that mineral, so it actually increase innovation. 

Water is the only resource that cannot be substituted by something else. 

There is definitely a need for Lightning Node operators to have a dedicated discussion section on this forum to streamline and fine tune this technology. We are still many miles away from mainstream adoption of this technology and there are still loads of wrinkles to iron out before this can happen.

Thank you for your contribution and what you are doing to make this a success and ignore the negativity from people wo are spectators on the side line and not part of the actual game.  

I just love paper wallets and I frequently give funded paper wallets as gifts for Birthdays and Xmas gifts. I tell them that I will move the coins from that wallet to another wallet within 1 year of giving the gift, if they do not move those funds within that year to their own wallet. I also provide them with a step by step guide on how to sweep that wallet onto another Bitcoin address, so it is just laziness if they do not do it themselves. 

The money on the paper wallet is enough of an incentive to get them to follow the guide to either sweep the coins or to cash it out.    <I have 1000s of paper wallets that I printed a year or two ago and none of them have been compromised.> 

The Blockchain.info and Blockchain.com domains are creating some confusion with people, even if you get redirected to the same site.   It makes it easier for people to look at other Phishing domains that looks close to the actual domain and to be redirected to the wrong site.

How do you browse to the wallet provider? People use search engines to navigate to their wallet providers and then they get re-directed to the wrong sites, because hackers manipulate the results that these search engines provide to the users.  

I am not to fond of hardware wallets for long-term storage, because they constantly need firmware upgrades and some of these upgrades can be tricky, like we saw with Ledger a while ago.    <Devices can also fail, it is a clever toaster> 

I like to store large amounts on laminated Paper wallets and I make sure I make several copies and store them in different locations. I bought a cheap computer and printer and I printed 1000s of paper wallets and then destroyed the equipment, so nobody would ever be able to recover anything from those devices. 

TheQuin is it not against the rules to promote a referral link in your signature on this forum? If it is not, I would want a link to your source code for the banner in your signature.  

Could you possibly ask Wetsuit to add a extra option under the personal stats to show your winnings and spending on the new betting being done on this site? I have done multiple bets and I cannot keep track on what I am winning and losing anymore.  

I just see my balance changing and then I have to go through multiple bets to see if I have won and sometimes it is not there anymore.  

Ask yourself the question, why is all that accountability important to them? Is it in their main interest to show everyone what they are doing and how they are spending your tax money? A lot of these governments are corrupt to the core and they do not want transparency and efficiency, so this would not be a priority concern for them. 

Yes, as citizens we would like it if they were totally transparent and it would be nice if we knew where our tax money are going and how it was spend, but that is just a pipe dream.

They might use some "private" Blockchain technology to create a smoke screen that they are using it to the benefit of their voters, but it would be controlled by them. <So-called GovCoins> 

What happened to all of these so-called KYC/AML regulations that you have to adhere to, before you can use these ATMs? I have seen ATMs where you have to take photo's of yourself, before you can use these ATMs. 

Most money laundering happens within a regulated environment and with cash, so why would they want to target Bitcoin ATM's now? I think it is time for Andreas to visit them again and to find out how they can resolve this problem. 

The "It's not centralized" made me laugh! 

A global economic collapse has been predicted for years, but economists and politicians are trying to mask this collapse with manipulation of the markets so that the ordinary people would continue investing in worthless stocks and bonds and other financial instruments that they control.

I have seen this happening for years now and I can also see that the tax bailouts cannot save the global economy for much longer, so a economic collapse is inevitable.

Bitcoin is not linked to that, so you will be relatively protected from that. <Until institutional capital are allowed> 

The funny thing is that the US is printing $$$ like most toilet paper manufacturing industries are printing toilet paper and the Dollar is losing it's buying power, so your $500 000 will not buy you a roll of toilet paper in the near future, if things continue at this trend. 

It's like saying that you own 3,000,000,000 Kazakhstani Tenge, if you own 1 Bitcoin, wich might be true, but it is absolutely worthless if you look at the massive amounts of Tenge that are printed. 

What would be the point of this? It only gives our enemies some more ammunition to create FUD about Bitcoin and most of these so-called hacks was flaws in a 3rd party service and mostly in-house, not hacks from external entities. 

Yes, it might be helpful if you can use this to highlight how "bad" third party services are and how important it is not to use Bitcoin via these services and also to eliminate or counter thumb suck statistics that are quoted in popular media.