Scammers and hackers are entirely different if you are not aware of it  , looks like these third world countries are sponsoring these hackers to target the exchanges as they are easy targets because of the lack of security features they have and how causal some of these exchanges handle user funds and there is not much sweat to exploit these exchanges and majority are from Russia and North Korea.

I am not convinced that these drug lords are using bitcoin to transact in the dark web when there are many anonymous coins in the market that will give privacy for their transaction, from what i understand is that they are blaming bitcoin for the illegal transactions and i am sure they understand the difference between bitcoin and the rest of the coins in the market. I support their hunt for illegal drugs distribution and violence but blaming bitcoin for everything is not the proper way to conduct things.

People who are not aware of the technology behind bitcoin might use it for illegal purposes and every transactions are recorded and cannot be altered and in the next ten years if there were such activities  being carried out by anyone i expect them to be behind bars by that time, even if some fools use bitcoin for nefarious reasons that does not mean that bitcoin is a risk to its users,

I am not sure whether any government will accept to provide transparency to their citizens and hence  these sort of benefits provided by the blockchain technology will be neglected by the government and if you look closely the main countries that has already banned or planning to ban bitcoin are third world countries which are corrupted to the core and they might want to reject the entire idea of transparency.
Bitcoin is not just a store of value, if it is not used as a transaction platform globally then there is no point in seeing them as a store of value, it will be just a speculative market with no base.

You might be wrong here with this statement, fiat digital money is secure when it comes to user perspective, if i loose my money from any of the banks, i can very well claim that amount and they will have to refund it, if they are hacked or stolen without my knowledge and that is the most secure part and that cannot be said about crypto currency as there is no guarantee if your money is lost to hackers, as money once lost is lost forever.

These scams are carried out to people who are new to the new market and trying to multiple their profits and they end up being scammed and this is the usual theme that happens to newbies in the market, the awareness that there is nothing free and the possibility of multiplying your asset in a short period of time are just fake promises to steal your money, majority of the scams are done with fiat currency in the name of bitcoin and hence everything is not traceable.

There are places in the world where there is no internet connection or mobile towers and you can empower them by building infrastructure and then spreading the word about bitcoin and teaching them about the benefits and then open them to the world so that they can have interactions with the outside world and learn things as well as open to international trading and that is how you reduce poverty and if that happens then bitcoin is a benefit for all the under developed countries.

The people who did launder money with bitcoin can be traced in the future as it is a public ledger that has every transaction being recorded and no one can delete those and even with those kind of transparency if fools did launder money, then they will understand the situation they are in when authorities knocks their doors, i am not talking about privacy coins as they are meant to hide every transactions but with bitcoin it is an impossible task.

I am certain that amazon and other E commerce sites will start accepting bitcoin eventually because it opens up international trading with ease without any headache of cash backs for the merchants and bitcoin is the only answer to get rid of the charge back headaches and other disputes in the future, if i am speculating, the main reason i think for getting delayed is that bitcoin still needs to scale for much bigger transactions for them to accept it and the volatile transactions charges might be the reason and once lightning network is adopted, then they might open a channel and start accepting bitcoin.

So you think these whales are not people  some robots hoarding these coins for them to control the entire financial market in the future  . When 21 million bitcoins are mined it will take more than hundred years and with the way things are going, i cannot imagine the price of bitcoin fifty years from now, let alone hundred years and the so called whales could hold trillions of dollars worth of bitcoin at that time which could consume the entire financial structure.

PS: I liked your comedy and so is my response. If you claim that these random figures are facts, put up some source of study and prove them rather than saying random figures and claiming that to be true  .

In that contest it true that it is not a big thing, but lets see what blockchain is all about, every transaction is recorded and it is not like the rest of the financial transactions, every transactions can be traced and we could eliminate every fraud in the market and bitcoin could be a market that bad actors would not dare to try and we will reach those position in the future and i hope every fraud being done with blockchain will be traced back in the future and they will get punished for their actions.

It is not about awareness of the new market, everyone who is literate enough to understand the financial market will know the current trends and bitcoin is the top performer in the financial sector for a few years now and hence everyone is aware of its existence, the problem is that those countries does not understand how to tame an international market and make a law that could be fair for them to tap into the gains earned by its citizens  .

Cryptocurrency market will be decentralized even with all the rules and regulations if you are dealing only with crypto market, once you plan to convert it to fiat currency then do not expect the decentralization as every transaction will be tracked to you. Even with laws you cannot retrieve bitcoin transactions, once the coins leaves your wallet then it is not yours, so be careful not to make those silly mistakes. 

Amused with all the responses here, if you really think that bitcoin will eventually be replaced by another coin then no one in the right might out would invest in anything that will eventually run out  . Bitcoin is here to stay and nothing is going to replace it and it will not run out of coins, in the beginning some people lost their coins because they were not serious about storing the keys as it has no valuation and that is not the situation now.

The price rally of bitcoin always surprise us, the price has crossed over $9000 and once again we are seeing a bit of selling pressure, the price went over $9300 but has come down and it looks like we need some time to cross that resistance level, the next two days will determine whether we will go over the current resistance level or go back to $8000 levels, it is an interesting time for traders as i am still confused what to make of the situation .

If you look at forex exchange the price are not stable either, the price changes differ all the time according to the exchange rate at that particular time, so telling you cannot accept bitcoin because of its volatility is not a sound defense , not sure what you mean by requiring exact amount  .


You cannot manipulate a decentralized global market until you have millions of bitcoin, you need to still pay your taxes for the profits you make with bitcoin and there is no exception for that but the dream about some country replacing their national country for bitcoin is the wildest dream anyone could have as the realistic possibility to see that happening is zero.

Here you are talking about thousands of years of currency evolution from the gold coins of the Roman empire to the current state which took centuries to reach where we are now and to image that the world will adopt bitcoin in the near future is a fantasy thought process, bitcoin is not empowered by any state or country to adopt them as their primary currency and bitcoin is not here to take over any countries fiat currency, it is still in the beginning phase and governments around the world are planning to implement rules and regulations to see how bitcoin fit in their economy.

The reason why bitcoin got this much traction even during the initial stages is because of its decentralized nature and online merchants were dealing with account closure from centralized platforms like paypal without any notification and stagnation from merchant accounts and the introduction of bitcoin was a boost to their business as there will be no dispute after the transaction being done.

If you are investing in bitcoin you need the help of banks or fiat currency to purchase the coins and there is no way around it and hence there is no point in hating the banks.

People depend on centralized exchanges for a reason, the high liquidity and the ease of which they can execute their orders and some major exchanges allow features such as stop loss and other options to make things easier for the users and so is the reason decentralized exchanges did not get much traction or liquidity even though there are many in the  market and that will be the case with any other feature, as you mentioned it will be an alternate option for swapping small amount of coins.

Come on Steve why don't you give us a clue about the big announcement so that everyone could speculate what that would be and will make that a topic of discussion  . Is it regarding a new license or another one

Hope you are aware that this sports book is active for a very long time, yes they had their hiccups in the past when it comes to settling bets after winning but mostly they have sorted those issues and now running smoothly, not sure about the odds provider problem you are talking about as i did not see any issue with them regarding the odds, if you could explain clearly the team should resolve that without hesitation.

The sports betting option was a good addition, i recently came back to the site after three years gap and was surprised to see the difference, made some sports bets but i would like to see a parlay option being added, not sure whether it is already included and i am missing it somehow, if not adding a parlay would be a good option, the reason for that is on certain days you will see two events you wanted to bet and if i had parlay i would gladly do that but now i have to wait a day after the results to get my coins to bet again, hope  the team will add that soon.