Um, exchanges don't get any of the fees. They go to the miners. And it's not as if you can arrange kickbacks when you have no idea who'll mine it.

Like I said, it's to keep their users from whining about stuck transactions. Whether more of them whine about high fees is an unknown. I think it's probably going to be less.

If you've been into this for a while there must now be areas, attitudes and subjects that are an instant turn off for you.

What are they?

Among many things I think the main one for me is the seemingly never ending parade of staggering stupidity. How people still fall for things like these Twitter giveaway scams is beyond me. It's so obvious it makes my tits burst. The rabid willingness of people to hand over their appreciating and irreversible money to people one knows nothing about promising agonisingly obvious bollocks seemingly never fails.

Another one is the speed at which sentiment turns. A drop of a few hundred dollars means zero by the end of the week. It goes up a few hours later, 100k by tomorrow. For some reason there can never be a middle ground where not a great deal happens either way. I see this even from the oldest of hands on occasion.

My personal pet loathing supreme is when a government seizes coins and all the bubbleheads here screech about it being dumped on Yobit, despite them obviously going to auction or disappearing in a private sale.

Now vent.

They're legit and always will be. There are few others that sure as shit are not and were emptied.

I've always found it really weird the hall pass people gave physical coin creators when it came to the handling of private keys. They're just another anon prick. Just because they're gluing a private key to a lump of metal does not mean it magically spirits away their dodgy as fuck tendencies.

I give it a couple of months before it dies. The people who provide these back ends will not risk their banking relationships for this. They make tons out of selling electricity, gas and phone credit through newsagents.

It's been attempted in the UK a few years ago. That lasted a few weeks in total.

https://www.coindesk.com/zipzap-resumes-cash-bitcoin-services-uk-shoppers/

They already have gone to sleep to an extent. I don't keep up with Poloniex's overall position any more but many of the top ten there now have volumes in the hundreds of BTC when it used to be thousands, tens of thousands and occasionally over one hundred thousand.

The problem all of these places have is that they require real people behind the scenes. Real people take time and money to find and train, but bubble madness can descend in a few short weeks and blast all of the exchanges. By the time they've started to address it, the scene might go dead for a few months or years.

So Ledger are releasing a soon to be mandatory update for the Nano S.

The reason is hinted at here - https://twitter.com/spudowiar/status/970977060134023168

I've read elsewhere that physical access is required for any issues so everyone should be fine.

However I can only imagine the amount of problems that pop up will increase as the amount of money lurking on hardware wallets accelerates. The incentives are just too enormous.

I'm nowhere near savvy enough to know whether something is coded well but I have faith in the creators and coders to do their best to stay on top of things, however there's no shortage of dodgy people with matching skills who'll go all out to beat them and it could a finely balanced race.

Will you choose to keep the faith no matter what happens or regress to things like paper wallets if more weirdness emerges?

They're still swamped by the sounds of it and so swamped that perhaps they'll never catch up. I've no idea where you'd find 50 people to help run such a place with the skills, honesty and competence. And there's a good chance alts will go quiet in which case there's no way they can afford to pay that number of people. That's the problem with an area that surges and then goes to sleep for months on end. I wonder if that can ever be solved.

They should've shut down new registrations when it reached a few tens of thousands more than they were expecting, not let it get up to over one million.

I for one have never had a problem there but that's primarily because I chose to avoid it when all these issues started to pop up.

Yup.

https://www.cheapair.com/

https://destinia.com

Both of the above take BTC directly.

Or you could get travel gift cards with BTC from the places below.

https://www.gyft.com/buy-gift-cards/category/travel/

https://giftoff.com/gift-cards?filters%5Bsort%5D=alpha&filters%5Bcategory%5D=15&filters%5Bcountry%5D=241&page=1


Most Bitcoin debit cards are dead.

I am profoundly uninterested in anything the Guardian has to say on this subject. They're such whiny molly coddling nanny state fucksticks that anything that offers people some actual freedom or fosters some rational thinking would cause them to toss their lentils.

These days I loathe the Guardian even more than the Daily Mail which is a genuinely epic achievement.

As no laws apply to the actual trading of cryptocurrencies, what can they prosecute? It's not the stock market. It's a filthy free for all.

I certainly agree that Coinbase's launch was dodgy as fuck that bears no resemblance to ethical behaviour, but having your feelings hurt is a bit different to smashing actual laws.

No. People who think it's a safe haven are deluding themselves. Anything could happen to its price. The current and previous heights are fuelled by pure speculation and excitement.

In all of BTC's life there's never yet been a significant downturn in wider markets. It's easy for anything to boom when everything else is. If that falters then we'll see who or what is swimming naked. My guess is that Bitcoin is a luxury bet. If there's a proper squeeze it'll be the first thing people get rid of.

This is the best place to keep abreast of discussion on this subject - https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinUK/

There are quite a few accountant types on there now accepting clients. It appears you're at the mercy of the HMRC's interpretation on a case by case basis for certain details.

For instance for crypto to crypto trades there are plenty of people who are classing them as a disposal and therefore taxable, others are being vehement about only paying at the moment of GBP conversion.

They may have been one of the first, but they're still being a lot fuzzier than they need to be.

Exchanges are traditionally extremely slow to react to fee changes. And their preference is always extreme overkill as it's one less problem to deal with, otherwise they'd get their customers whining about stuck coins.

It pays to shop around. Some exchanges have much lower withdraw fees than others. If you're transferring to another exchange then it may pay to move money between them with another coin, but watch those spreads or you may end up out of pocket.

I wouldn't. And the variation in prices are as you say because in certain places it can't be deposited or withdrawn. The places you can the price is a fraction of the frozen ones.

The market for these fork coins is hideously distorted and there's no way of telling whether any of them have a future. If you got some free ones, great. If you didn't then I'd let it play out in peace.

Almost certainly not but I'm sure they'd love to come up with something like that. I wonder if they launched something purposefully weaker than the equivalent Nvidia and told gamers it was an attempt to deter miners whether they'd be impressed or appalled.

It comes and it goes. As soon as people get comfortable with the idea of the Weekend Dump in the past it often switched to the weekend pump to relieve people of their money with ease.

I've never bought the idea of fiat not arriving being the reason for a dump. Perhaps 0.5% of the USD on exchanges is fresh. The rest is sitting there waiting to be spent 7 days of the week.

You bet. NEM has a fraction of the volume of other large projects. It can't take this selling pressure. Others would suffer too but not to that extent.

If AMD comes out with something that's useless for mining compared to Nvidia then they will pick up all of the business of priced out gamers. Sounds like a win win for them. They may right now be developing something that's genuinely awful for mining in the hope of being dropped by miners.

Bitcoin's already persona non grata in the UK. There ain't no banking for it. They can't 'regulate' something that's been ostracised from minute one. I'm rather looking forward to the UK being left in the dust for their pure fuckwittage when it comes to this area.

Government naivety when it comes to internet related stuff still appears to be bottomless. Check the 'let's crack cryptography' legislation that everyone knows will never amount to anything.

I wonder how much death, rape, abuse and horror Windows has enabled over the years. Probably rather a lot of it. Does it mean Windows is evil? It probably is but for reasons other than that.

Bill's fortune is in dollars, his trade was creating and controlling markets, his calling is to cure the world.

All of those things point to a fondness for paternalism which is the antithesis of what BTC is about.