In countries with colder climate (Sweeden, Finland etc..) where the electricity is cheap enough to use electric heaters to heat their houses it can be a wise decision to change the electric heater panels to mining rigs, they can produce the same amount of heat to make the houser warm enough... The only drawback can be that the ASICs are insanely loud (if there are a lot of them) so it's better to keep them in the basement...

I've made a quick google search for these hardware wallets.
https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@ipromote/new-hardware-wallet-in-town
Found that the more expensive one has an LCD screen but the cheaper has not, which is not an option for me, I want to be 100% sure that the address I see in the browser matches the hardware wallet's screen.

Something has came into my mind, when I saw this:
"Both devices have an optional yearly subscription to backup your keys in encrypted form off site."
So if it's possible to have a bacup of the private key off site (and it's done via the software) it will be possible to read out the private keys remotely?
Question nr. 2, about this statement:
"The device also allows you to use a mobile phone with NFC and USB."
It's fine that android devices will be able to connect via USB but the apple products don't use USB and apple doesn't easily allow 3rd parties to use the NFC in the apple devices (they try to protect apple pay, and using a hardware wallet can be a form of payment...)
Anyway, we'll see the outcome

Have you checked the log?
Does it have more detailed error message or that contains only the same information as the screenshot?

The next step for bitcoin and the technology is the Lightning network. It's in beta testing now, but don't expect really quick implementation, because there's a lot to do still in the development.
This solution will solve the problem of the slow confirmation, so if you don't want to get involved in testing, you only need to wait. More and more people are interested in bitcoin and the other cryptos, but I don't see their willingness to learn about it, all they want to know is that the cryptos are the key to be rich, really quickly, the details are not important for most of them...

Nice post, and really long
I'm interested in the accounting (book-keeper's) perspective of this whole process.
When you receive payment for anything in bitcoin (and I don't know in which country you are testing this) you should somehow register that payment, in order to show the tax authority your earnings and costs (if you're a shop and not a person).
If you receive cash or receive a payment with credit/debit card, it's not a problem, because the payments will show up among the liquid assets (cash at hand, cash at bank). when you receive bitcoin from a customer, where do you put that kind of income? Is it a kind of 'other receivables'? And when you exchange it for fiat, you can move that amount to the 'cash at bank'?
I'm really interested, and I hope that someone will have the experience and will show to do these kind of things...

What will make the price of the coins in a centralized blockchains less volatile compared to bitcoin? If they will create their own coin, the change in the demand for that coin will change the price too (prices are influenced by the supply and the demand on the market, and it's true for all kind of stuff, except the monopolized things).
Or, if the owners of the coin wants to influence the price, they will have to buy the coins if the price goes down, and they have to sell if the price is skyrocketing, if they don't want any volatility... This means they have to invest real money into it every time when the price goes down, but on the long run, it's not a simple solution against the volatility...

The lightning network is necessary because next time people will rush again for bitcoin it will be a much higher demand for bitcoin compared to the end of 2017 (noone knows when it will start again...). That time the mempool was full and the transaction fee was high (higher than before, ever). Now those days are over and we have a kind of grace period, which is good to prepare for the next rush...
It's easier (and cheaper) now to test opening and closing the channels when the mempool is nearly empty, so it's good for the development too.

I have a way much easier concern compared to bible beast thins and so on...
I would prefer to wear these kind of things as a ring, or any other similar jewelry... why? Because if someone attacks me, I can give the ring to the attacker (or just drop it unnoticedly somewhere I can find it later on) and depending on the attacker's intentions you're safe after...
What happens if this thing is inside your hand? And e.g. contains 10 BTC because you're just about to buy a car, house, etc... and some attackers stop you and asks for that money? (Scans you unnoticedly before...)
You can't hand over your hand... If the value is high enough, they will take you with themeselves, or just your hand with the chip.... thanks, no...

Really interesting idea. I thought it over a few times, and found out another idea.
Why to change the WIFI routers, firmware, OS, etc? There are WIFI routers that belong to the internet service providers, so sometimes the end user is not allowed to change the configuration at all.
The original idea is still interesting, but what if you (or anyone) develop a USB stick style device? Every (or most) WIFI router nowdays have a USB connection for printers, USB thumb drives, etc...
If someone develop a USB stick that works as a lightning hub, it would solve the problem in an easier way. (like nowdays it's possible to install a lightweight LN hub on a Raspberry PI, which is larger than a USB stick but time will solve the problem of the size). Or, the device itself doesn't need to connect to the USB port of the router, just to the LAN port for connection and some power from a power source and that's all. (Like the PI).
Just an idea...

The G20 conference is about to start in Buenos Aires (Argentina), it will be on 18th and 19th March.
The interesting part will be on 19th March, 12:00 (local time) it's about the crytpos: CRYPTOCURRENCIES AND POTENTIAL REGULATION
According to the agenda, this program will be just before lunch, so I really hope that the decision makers won't be too hungry to make smart decisions about the regulation of the cryptos
You can find the agenda here:
https://www.iif.com/node/11232/agenda

Be really careful when you create a paper wallet, there are some scam sites who offer you to generate private/public key pairs but they will store those keys and after a while when you top up that address with bitcoins, they will move the bitcoins away with the stored private key.
To prevent this, you can find really good guides on this forum, how to generate those keys offline, to be on the safe side with your paper wallet.

No, my idea is to have a so called neutrino version of the lnd. This means that it only takes 200-300 MegaBytes, because it's a kind of pruned node, so it doesn't download and keep the whole blockchain on site (and does not use 200-400 GigaBytes like a full node) but it connects to some full nodes on the network.
For testing purposes, it's fine for me, if I'll take it more seriously in the future, I just attach a USB external drive with a 500Gb HDD and it can act as a full node with the full blockchain on the HDD.

There's no need to control it directly, it's enough to control the entry and the exit point of money to/from blockchain. When it's about to exchanging the existing coins to fiat, there's the point when the tax authorities are interested in the transaction. This is enough, as long as the acceptance of cryptos are remaining in this state. As soon as people will accept crytos for p2p trades (like they will accept bitcoin when selling a second hand laptop, PC or anything else) than it will be harder to the authorities to manage the whole process. As long as the merchants won't accept bitcoin because of the uncertain law situation, governments have the time to think about the necessary steps to handle cryptos...

The Lightning network has moved to beta, so now it's possible to officially do testing on the mainnet. Until now, most of the mainnet testing was done without support from the developers, I hope that from now on the support will help the testers.
In connection with the thread, we need to upgrade the lnd because the changes compared to the previous version are not backward compatible because of the new beta version.

The Lightning network has developed to another phase, it's in beta now, and it's good news also that Twitter is counting on the Lightning Network's advantages. It doesn't mean that we'll pay with bitcoin at the groceries store next week, but it's a good sign that the technology has the possibilities. If the development continues, the time of the daily payments for bitcoin is not far away anymore...

Coinbase will become a real bank, sooner or later... with all the KYC and AML regulations, this is why it will be easier (and quicker) to handle the fiat transactions in the future. At least, they have the customer base, so they only need to fine tune their service based on their experiences. They will not become a real bank, of course, because this is only an e-money licence, but if it's enough for them to do the business electronically, they can become a leader among the e-money issuers, thanks to the existing and wide user base.

I know a lot of good ICOs at the moment, they should be affected heavily with this ban... I know that a lot of ICOs are using telegram, discord and other new social channels to spread the information, so the ban of FB and Google makes it harder to do the marketing for the ICO, but it's not completly impossible still.
Of course it will be harder to advertise the ICO, especially to everyday people, because they mostly use FB or Google, but this is a challenge for the ICOs to handle this situation. Those ICOs that has a large user base will solve this situation somehow, but most of the scammy ICOs will fail (hopefully) after this ban.

Ledger supports a lot of alts, so if you want to store several alts on the same hardware wallet, it's possible with it, Trezor can store less alts, but still managable. (OK, I know that technically the coins are not stored on the device itself, it only stores the private keys to be able to transact with the coins...)
So if the number of supported altcoins makes the difference, Ledger is better (and cheaper). However, Ledger only allows you to manage only a few of the alts at the same time, but this is also managable via the Ledger app (Chrome extension). I don't know about major differences in case of security, both hardware wallets are secure enough for everyday use.

You have made several offline wallets and none of them was robbed since, it's not an evidence that they're not known by the service provider. Maybe the original website is safe but you never know if the website has just been hijacked or not... So it's always better to just save a copy of the private key generating script and run it on an offline computer. Better safe than sorry...

If you look at these news from a different point of view...
FB and Google are trusted by the average people, so they have to be careful what they offer for people, who don't have a clue about cryptos and ICOs. If they offer them scammy ICOs they will blame these giants. On the other hand, I think they both planning to implement some blockchain based solution for themselves (a centralized one, to be in control) and if they lead people to scam ICOs before they are able to implement their own coin, they will lose the benefits of it, because people won't trust these coins at all anymore.