When people keep their coins on exchange or some other online wallets, they don't control their private keys, they all trust that the owner will send them coins when they request withdrawals. It's just like banks, so sometimes those exchanges get hacked, and sometimes they turn into scams and disapper with all the coins of their customers. There's a good saying in Bitcoin community - if you don't control private keys, then it's not your coins.

In my mind, if they didn't rob or scam someone, then it's fair. You may or may not like the fact that some people got rich easily, but they didn't do any harm to others, so it can't be a crime.
The idea that speculative profits are unfair comes from communist ideology, because in that theory value is created only through labor, therefore any non-labor income have to be some sort of a fraud, otherwise communists just can't explain it within their theory. But Austrian and mainstream economics view trading as a positive function that establishes market prices and creates signals that guide economic growth.

Did you (and some other posters here) read the article or only the title? Spoiler: the article is actually very thoroughly criticizing the book titled "The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism“. So there's no big need to debunk that Bitcoin is racist here, the article covered it pretty well.


Austrian economics, just like Bitcoin's software, is independent from political ideologies. The fact that some right-wingers are fans of Austrian theory doesn't mean that Austrian theory is based on right-wing ideology or supports it.

You're right, spam is not exactly the right term here, what is happening here is that Coinbase maliciously refusing to optimize their transactions in order to either convince community that Bitcoin needs bigger blocks or that altcoins like Bcash and Ethereum are superior to Bitcoin because they have cheaper fees. And unlike with traditional spam attacks, Coinbase is using funds of their customers to fuel this attack, because most of the time it's them who are paying the fees.

I think every crypto casino that wants to be up to date has to support multiple coins to cover all the possible needs of their players. Here's my list of coins that I would add if I was running a casino:

Bitcoin: the king of crypto, still very popular even despite high fees, and Lightning Network is coming closer and closer to mainnet release. Also, Bitcoin is the best coin for bankroll investors because it's less volatile and more predictable than any altcoin.

LTC: Bitcoin's younger brother, currently has cheaper fees. Potential for atomic swaps and Lightning.

Dogecoin: ultra cheap fees, perfect for players with tiny bankrolls.

Monero: the best privacy coin, very much needed in online gambling for some users.

The first multinational cryptocurrency is Bitcoin - the protocol doesn't even know what is borders and countries. This is often overlooked, but until Bitcoin there was no payment method that allowed sending money to every other country on the globe from any other country on the globe.
But here we have a "cryptocurrency", that is probably just a centralized payment system, that will work only in certain countries, and Russia presents it like a huge achievement. Government-backed cryptocurrencies are just an attempt to rebrand national banks.

https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/cash/#24h

Bcash mempool has over 80 MB of <5 sat/byte transactions, so miners aren't even bothering to include them in blocks because they probably think that it's a spam, but some of those transactions probably belong to genuine users, which proves that fee market is a vital part of the protocol (I saw some people seriously suggesting to cap max fee, lol).

But what I would like to see is how many Bcash real nodes will leave the network after some periods of time of 8 MB blocks, and how much RAM, bandwidth and disk resources it takes to run a Bcash node under full load, so we can compare it with BitFury's estimations for 8 MB blocks.

Are there any estimations for how many users were critically vulnerable to this potential attack, i.e. had unencrypted seeds in their wallet files? I've tried to do some research, but failed to determine if Electrum was always asking for password during new wallet creation process, or this feature was added with some version? Also, is password optional during creation?
Some users and media have misunderstood this vulnerability and started claiming that "Electrum is completely broken and anyone can steal your coins when you run it", which is simply not true, so it's better to clear this misunderstanding.

We should blame banksters and economists for that, they all praise "blockchain technology" while they bash Bitcoin, so now we have a strong public opinion that blockchain is revolutionary new tech. They have tried to embrace, extend, extinguish cryptocurrencies, but instead have fueled the dotcom bubble 2.0.  But Bitcoin should be fine, since the very same people have separated Bitcoin from blockchain in their comments, so investor won't automatically assume that they correlate, and when alts and blockchain companies will crash, they won't take Bitcoin with them.

You are making the same mistake that so many noobs are making- getting into something you don't understand and then thinking you are an expert who can predict future paradigms. In reality, Bitcoin has a very high learning curve, you have to spend weeks and months reading books, papers, articles and discussions to start understanding how it works. Meanwhile, altcoin marketers are preying on noobs and selling them centralized systems masquerading as cryptocurrencies. So, if you really value your money, you should spend your time studying the technology instead of blindly believing what other people say, because eventually centralized and worthless coins will die, and you don't want to be a bagholder when it'll happen.

I'm curious if this exodus will actually decrease mining centralization or not. There's a popular belief that somewhere between 70% and 80% of mining power concentrated in hands of just a few pool owners, and that Bitmain can leverage their monopolistic position influence the miners, so even if Chinese miners will scatter across the globe, they still might depend on Bitmain and pools. But if these centralization fears are overblown, this exodus might be a good thing, because we will be sure that a single government can't seize enough equipment to get majority of Bitcoin's hashpower, unless majority of Chinese miners will move to a single country.

This has been proposed many times, and there are two big problems with it:

1) how can the protocol distinguish between real nodes and virtual nodes?

2) what if people will find a way to pool it like it happened with mining?

Problem 1) is very hard or maybe even impossible to solve, although not much people are trying. Problem 2) will cause centralization, because people will be profiting from creating big farms, and due to cheaper electricity/better cooling they might outspace home node operators. making node running unprofitable again.

Blocksize still remains a highly discussed topic on Bitcoin forums, and even if we can't convince big blockers that big blocks are dangerous, I believe it's still important to keep debating it with them so newcomers will learn about it while reading those discussions.

In this light, I think it would be nice if we had some experimental data that ties various blocksizes to hardware requirements for running a full node. I know there's this paper by BitFury, but it seems like their data is a theoretical prediction and not an actual benchmark.

1. Are there any real benchmarks available in the open? I've tried searching and haven't found anything.

2. How hard it would be to do some experiments in regtest or on private test network to make benchmarks for different blocksizes?

How can fees kill Bitcoin? They are only as high as people are willing to pay, it's an open and dynamic bidding on blockspace - if people would start leaving Bitcoin because they don't want to pay high fees, fees will go down because there will be less competition for blockspace.

Disk space is only a part of full node resource requirements, it also consumes CPU processing power, RAM, bandwidth, disk reading and writing. If you will increase the blocksize, all of those factors will increase in O(n), weaker nodes will be knocked off the network, more powerful nodes will notice that Bitcoin takes so many resources that it's impossible to run it in the background while they run their programs, and people who buy powerful computers are doing this for a reason - either work or entertainment, so they will be turning off their node software, which will result in lower uptimes. And all this negative stuff won't solve the scaling, it will merely kick the can down the road and fees will be high again in short time.

I've been saying for a long time that transactions to/from exchanges generate almost all Bitcoin's transaction traffic, so for now those centralized services have a huge responsibility to optimize their own transactions by implementing SegWit, optimizing their fee estimations and batching their withdrawals, which would significantly lower fees for their customers and the whole network in general. Here's a picture that supports my theory - it's clear that there's correlation between fees and trading volume.

Now, recently Coinbase had a problem and they have turned off withdrawals for some time, and many people have noticed that this resulted in decrease of transactions traffic:

https://twitter.com/CivEkonom/status/951693684692701184

https://twitter.com/ziggamon/status/951700118830432257

https://twitter.com/JordanTuwiner/status/951698069967589376

So, it is estimated that Coinbase creates 58% of all Bitcoin transactions today, and because they still don't use SegWit and don't batch transactions, their customers are paying ridiculously high fees, which also raises the fees for all users of the network. Many people, myself included, believe that Coinbase is maliciously attacking Bitcoin in order to boost altcoins like Bcash and Ethereum and centralize Bitcoin by pushing for bigger blocks.

In trading/investing you are supposed to never get emotionally attached to your positions. So, rationally, we should be ready to sell Bitcoin if the situation will look grim for it - maybe competitors will get a better tech at some point (contrary to a popular believe, todays altcoins are nowhere near close to having better tech), or maybe it will get globally outlawed (which won't kill it, but will significantly cripple).
But if everything will be alright, then maybe long-term hodlers won't have to sell, because they will be able to spend it easily instead. After all, Bitcoin is a currency, not a stock or a commodity (inb4 high fees blah-blah).

So, I will try to never exit fully and always have some coins as my savings, but as for partial exits, I'll probably trade some coins for real estate in a very distant future, when I'll feel like the market is very saturated and big bull runs are very unlikely.

With so many ICO's going on and traditional companies like Kodak and Telegram  launching their own ICO's, I wonder how are they actually viewed by the law? I know very little about regulations of investing in general, but I've heard that some forms of traditional crowdfunding are treated as donations so some scammers are just not delivering the product and face no consequences. And this is very similar to what we are seeing with ICO's - they publish whitepapers, which are promising to create some platform, but then never deliver and just keep promising that they will finish the project at some point in the future. Is this the case with ICO's, or they are already committing a fraud even though ICO's specifically are not yet fully regulated?  

Edit: please, back your comments with some links if it's possible, don't just post your wild guesses!

1) 10,000 BTC won't crash the market too hard, this is "only" 133 millions and Bitcoin's daily volume is 16 billions. By quickly looking at market depth, I'd say that dumping 10,000 coins would drop BTC to around $10,500 from the current $13,400.

2) Usually big sums are traded over the counter to avoid moving the market, and both sides are benefiting from it.

3) We can't know for sure if Satoshi is hodling all his coins or may sold some of them at some point, because no one really knows what addresses belong to him for sure. People speculate that he owns 1 million coins, but they don't sit in one address, most likely they are split in 50 BTC chunks of untouched miner rewards.

4) No one in their right mind would agree to buy a private key, so it's not an option for an off-chain private transactions.

The reason why this FUD is effective, even if it is baseless, is because the market is highly speculative, traders are selling because they expect that others will panic, so it turns into a self-fulfilling prophesy.
But we also have a lot of noob traders who don't verify the news and believe everything that they are spoon fed by news sites, analysts and social media, so together with speculative selling even when news can shake the market. With the time volatility will be decreasing as more professional traders will join the market, and they won't be so easily manipulated, making fake news less impactful, but until then we'll see a lot of FUD like this.

I wouldn't be surprised if it will turn out that Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and other entities are actively tradings Bitcoin and just making statements like this to manipulate the market. Maybe when the price was lower, they have wanted it to grow slower so they can accumulate more, so they were bashing Bitcoin, but now since Bitcoin skyrocketed, they might want to prevent it from crashing so they can lock-in their profits, so they are making positive comments. I have a hard time believing that they are having a genuine change of heart regarding Bitcoin, but who knows, this might be possible too.