For now, true.  People are getting desperate with the cryptocurrencies they pump.
Try transporting a few ingots of gold all the way to the other side of the world safely.  I think you'll find that the costs are hundreds of times higher than Bitcoin transaction fees, and it takes many times longer.
So I guess when transporting that gold, the beneficiaries are the commercial airlines.  
I think you're forgetting that there aren't many scarce physical resources to be controlled.  With cryptocurrencies there's a theoretically unlimited number, which makes them near impossible to regulate.

Ugh.  Please don't throw your money away investing too much in coins without actually thinking about what they are.

You're making unreasonable comparisons like Litecoin being $1000 and ETH being $1000.  ETH has a much higher supply than Litecoin and a much, much higher supply than Bitcoin.  A price of $1000 for ETH would mean that the market cap was about double what Bitcoin is now.  Sounds impossible?  It's not, but it's pretty damn unlikely.

You need to find coins that are actually underappreciated.  And to do that you have to think about the people behind it and what they actually do.  And you have to clear up the misconceptions that you build up from being too excited about this.

Don't believe the hype.

It doesn't matter whether you're mining Bitcoin, Steem, Ethereum or DASH.  No one gets ROI on Genesis Mining.  No one can do it.  And now that the price has gone up, people have started deluding themselves into thinking that it's possible. 

After the price has gone up dramatically for basically every single alt and for Bitcoin as well, there's now going to be a quick rise in difficulty to match that over the coming couple of months.

You'll find that your payouts get lower and lower and lower as the difficulty of Steem goes up and the price goes down.  Slowly but surely you lose all hope of achieving ROI.  After the two years of your contract are up, Genesis Mining have your miners for as long as they want to use it.

It's like a "legitimate" way to steal people's money.

Yeah, the Iraq, Syria and Libya wars have done so much to help stem the flow of terrorism haven't they?  The West have been so altruistic when pointlessly switching sides and fighting everyone at once, haven't they?  Don't try to convince yourself that 1.6 billion people are terrorists, which is clearly what you mean by "Islamization".

Do you even know what Muslims coming to the West as refugees are running away from?  It's a mixture of terrorism against them from "Muslims" (since the biggest victims of terrorism are Muslims by far), and terrorism from the West.

It's not bad until it starts becoming a meaningless echo chamber.  R/btc and r/bitcoin are much the same in that sense - the difference is that on r/bitcoin, I've seen things like Bitcoin related news and price discussion as well, while on r/btc it's the same relentless stream of ideology over and over again.

People on r/btc like to mention r/bitcoin censorship (which is probably true considering that r/bitcoin is basically 100% SegWit), but the last time I was on r/btc I saw a thread with a giant list of "trolls", suggesting that they should all be banned.  When people have this kind of victim mentality, it always ends up with hostility and a lack of real discussion.

You could compare it to terrorism.  Someone blows up several people, but then what happens is that the terrorists get exactly what they want when people start being paranoid about Muslims because then the opposing "side" look like idiots, and then they can use that for recruitment.  It becomes a cycle of hate crime and terrorism, which only gets worse the more people perpetuate that same victim mentality.

1.  It's well known that UASF needs some miner support, otherwise it would end up being impractical. 

2.  This doesn't mean that there would be "pool centralisation", because anyone could move over to another pool which allows them to mine for UASF (e.g. Slushpool).
This is a small pool.  If there were 50 pools like Kanopool, Bitcoin would not be centralised, and this is many times smaller than that to the extent that it's basically irrelevant.
No.  You can't just decide to not have any pools considering that there's only a block every ~10 minutes.  This pool is not greedy - yet.

I wouldn't call it an "accusation"; more like "the demented ramblings of a broken scammer".

If we're basing our accusations on "post history and behaviour", then I suppose Deja is an alt of kiklo.

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Clearly it's pretty normal activity to back out an escrow deal and accuse the escrows of being scammers rather than getting someone they believe is reliable to escrow instead.  That really makes me feel good about the Ethereum.link project.

I suppose while Deja is proving his legitimacy he'll go ahead and post Ethereum.link's public ICO address?

1.  Most Core developers don't support UASF, so the "threats" you talk about don't actually exist unless users end up supporting it and pushing the hashrate over to the new chain.

2.  When some people believed that BU was imminent and they were discussing it, they claimed that it would be an "altcoin", and that it should not be called Bitcoin but something else (sometimes with annoying buzzwords like BU-coin and Chinacoin, but let's ignore that).  Claiming that SegWit should be called something different is pretty much exactly the same and is illogical - both the old and new chain would be Bitcoin, but the one which we would typically consider Bitcoin is whichever one ends up being the majority chain.  If the old chain is still significant, it would be called "Bitcoin Classic" or something, just like ETC.

Hilarious stuff.  Jihan Wu doesn't lead ViaBTC.  For all we know he could be mining there, but I've seen no evidence of this.  I hope you feel good abusing a free service for your own greed.
Solution:  wait for ~3 weeks until you have BTC0.1 or so, then transfer to a new address.  Alternatively, just deal with the inputs - with current necessary fees it's not going to add more than ~0.0004 to your fees.  If you claim that you can't pay this with the income you receive, you're lying.

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IMO the best thing to do is to use the lowest fee on the recommended fees page which is estimated to be confirmed within 6 hours or so.  This way you avoid pushing up the fees for other people by perpetuating the fee market unless you have a high-priority transaction.

I would say that the Ether price, and the price of all the tokens that are created via the Ethereum network, are not based on their use but people believing that they could have a use.  Shitcoins (e.g. Footballcoin, Marijuanacoin or Pepecash), can get somewhere, because they pull in everyone who loses all their logic in a desperate get-rich-quick scheme.  But when there's a dip in a currency that people think has actually done something with blockchain technology, it doesn't crash completely and it tends to stay stable, even though there's no actual point in having a new token for it.  This applies to Ether, and speculation like this can do some crazy things.

I think that ETH will stay stable as long as people keep pumping out shitcoins on it, which could be for another 3-4 months.  The idea is that the shitcoins die, but ETH stays for as long as more shitcoins are on their way which have not died.

The number of active users on the forum is around 100,000 ("active" being users who were created more than 30 days ago and logged in within the last 30 days - theymos' info from this thread.  Considering that this is by far the biggest and most relevant Bitcoin forum, that should be a telltale sign.  Furthermore, it seems unusual that something with over 13.5% of the population using it would have a specific forum for discussion about it - you can't really imagine a "fiat forum".

Many people have heard of and seen Bitcoin, but whether this means that they use it is completely different.  And when we see "mainstream coverage" we focus on it too much and overestimate its power, just because we're into Bitcoin already.

You're right, I also don't know anyone else who's into crypto in real life.  That would suggest to me that the amount of people who actually are is less than 13.5%, since I know more than 7.407 people.  Of course this could just be a coincidence, but there are no reasonable indicators that more than a few million people are using or holding cryptocurrency.

Let's just go for the end of the innovator phase - 2.5% of the current population (rounded to 7.5 billion) would be about a hundred and eighty seven million five hundred thousand people.  Based on the statistic of unique addresses used in a day on blockchain.info, that many people would only send a transaction to a unique address every... several years.
All users of Bitcoin are users of blockchain technology, because Bitcoin is blockchain technology.  Therefore it's impossible for the number of users of blockchain technology to be fewer than the number of Bitcoin users.

Is everyone on this thread out of their mind?  The number of unique Bitcoin addresses used per day is around 500,000.  If we're very optimistic, that could be a few million active users and potentially some HODLers or traders as well.

That would put us at about 0.1% (absolutely right at the start of the innovator phase) max, if we assume that Bitcoin will actually match that adoption curve.

Stop thinking about things based on what you see today and assuming that everyone is into crypto just because you are.  Nearly no one actually is - many have heard of it but very few have got involved.

Don't know why you just suggested the opposite then.

True.  But more importantly, ETH has the mentality of being a master crypto.

What I mean by that is that it revolves around the idea of everyone else creating "decentralised" blockchain applications on their platform, in which case it would be a new kind of master crypto in which all other cryptos are created with Ethereum.  That basically makes Buterin an evil genius.

Bitcoin can still be a "master crypto" in price and usage in terms of merchants, but ETH's idea is to literally eat up every other new crypto by having them created on their platform, which puts them consistently in second place unless earlier coins like Litecoin take off more.

Sure the price is empty speculation, but some of the Bitcoin price is empty speculation as well.  The difference is that Ethereum is good at advertising, and Bitcoin finds this difficult due to actually being decentralised.  So ETH will be a secondary crypto for people who like ICO hype and couldn't care less about what Bitcoin actually does.

There's an interesting explanation for five year olds on Coindesk.  The idea is to compare Bitcoin to something physical (in their case, an apple).

I think the most important thing you need to change about both versions one and two is to include mentions of the double-spending problem and distributed ledger, as this is one of the most important things that blockchain technology has brought to the world.

Mining is important but it seems like a harder thing to explain and it needs to have the basics explained of creating decentralisation through a distributed ledger.  Then you move on later to mining, to explain how transactions are included in the ledger.

If you like security, then you keep absolutely all of your coins millions of miles away from any online wallet.  Using Coinbase you could get Goxed for all you know - with Jaxx you can't.  And Coinbase are a giant target for hackers and inside jobs, whereas a personal wallet is not (especially if you use a paper wallet and don't spend).

Also, Jaxx will give you a million more coins.

Jaxx can give you problems with the interface, but they're just that.  With Coinbase all you can see is the website, and it's terrifying to know that something much worse could be happening behind the scenes.
Or it's because:
1.  They're incompetent and can't use decent servers despite their outrageous fees
2.  They're manipulating customer funds.

There's a page of reviews on cryptocompare.

Seeing the reviews at first I was inclined to believe that they were legit.  However, upon seeing the users' profiles who left some of those reviews, I've decided that they are most likely a scam or at least engage in the shady business practice of paying for fake reviews.

Here is one of the users who left a five-star review of their service.  Despite having uploaded an avatar to look real, this person only has one review - that service - and he has upvoted all other positive comments about the service as well as downvoting negative comments.

If possible, use a trusted escrow.  The chances are that they will not do that, in which case don't buy.

TL;DR: unknown company creates entirely new miners and engages in shady business practices.  Possible/likely scam.

I would say the most "conservative move" would be not to mine the new chain.  Unless merchants, exchanges and other Bitcoin-related groups nearly unanimously decide to exclusively accept the UASF chain, I would say the far more "conservative" choice would be to continue mining the old chain.

With 10-20% of the hashrate, sending Bitcoin transactions on the new chain would be extremely impractical until the split is resolved.  Therefore in that period, without extremely wide community support (even among those who wouldn't know enough about UASF) for the new chain, I can't see miners switching over.

"The game" is only on if we're talking about >30% hashrate (like all SegWit miners).  Even then it's risky.

Have you gone insane or something?  Bitcoin's code is open-source and you'll find thousands of people with real backgrounds in IT who will tell you that this is a lie.  It could have been an inside job from BIT.AC but not from Bitcoin as a whole.

BIT.AC is completely unrelated to "the software that runs Digital-money" - you weren't running the software that runs digital money.  An example of software that runs Bitcoin would be Bitcoin Core, and a huge variety of other things.  When you put your money into an online wallet like BIT.AC, you do not own the coins.  They do and they are spending them for you.

Don't try and make the entire Bitcoin system seem bad when it's not.  If you have evidence that these guys were scammers (to be honest it's quite likely), then help to expose them and try to start legal action.  If not, you'll have no choice but to bite your tongue and move to a software wallet, paper wallet or hardware wallet.

Bitcoin is against everything that bankers would want from a currency.  It:

-Gives full control to its users, if they take responsibility by holding their Bitcoin in their own wallets
-Has a limited supply which prevents abuse
-Is moderately hard to trace to an individual
-Is moderately hard to take over and control

There's no relation to banks at all.  You could compare exchanges and online wallets to banks, but not Bitcoin as a whole.

I understand your point, but profit margins for Bitcoin miners can be pretty low and that is one big premium.  Unless people have some really desperate reason to buy, it seems pretty unlikely that they would buy at a premium of about 40%.  I couldn't see a lot of people doing it just for the benefit of getting their miner a month or two earlier.

Also, why have your own site for this instead of operating somewhere with common use of escrow (like with a thread on the forum)?

Buying a miner for $1640 from an unknown website with no escrow seems like just asking to get scammed.

There are people who can do this for you.  However, you might end up paying high fees.  You should go to the currency exchange section and you should find a few people who do this regularly.

One example is zazarb, who does the exchange with an added 7% onto the Bitcoin price.

If you want good rates, I would always suggest just using an exchange (and if you don't want to use ID, LocalBitcoins).