Well, I guess it depends. China is still doing fine since the ban of cryptocurrency, and I'd say crypto is doing worse due to the lack of Chinese whales that used to help push up the prices of BTC and other alts.

They don't have a vague stance on BTC really. It's banned due to decentralization, but crypto isn't because they are a fan of blockchain technology, if centralized.

Most miners are in the asian region due to their cheap electricity, especially India and China, and it's not very surprising.

I have a question though - do we think the new Chinese cryptocurrency will be mineable?

Bitstamp does have pretty ID verification from what I believe and isn't like regular exchanges that just require a passport/drivers license and a proof of address. I wouldn't really use them for anything, especially with so many exchanges out there that are very trusted and also don't require KYC unless you want to trade a lot of funds daily (Binance, Kucoin).

I've heard from friends that they ask for the source of your BTC (for a mining friend, he had to take photos of him next to miners, and showcase a lot of other privacy-breaching stuff just to withdraw his funds), as well as other things mentioned by figmentofmyass.

As much as it sucks, unless you are willing to give out a LOT of information about you, give up. Hopefully, it isn't a lot of money and you recover mate.

You certainly know your stuff, but forgot to add an extra issue with exchanges.

Scams - a lot of exchanges run away with user funds or run away after IEOing on their platform. Looking at recent events with IDax, no-one is safe from the scams.

Please follow Slow Death's request, and if I may add some of my own.

Who is included in your team? How many developers do you have, and how can you prove your exchange is protected from hacks, did you have a security check? Most exchanges often show photos of their entire team at meetings, for a newish exchange like you, this would do a to help prove legitmacy.

100 percent, definitely a nope. China's government is very safe and centralized and a couple of years ago, they already crushed the idea of having a cryptocurrency that was decentralized be popular in their system.

This situation reminds me of the one with Facebook. They had a stern look on cryptocurrencies and ICO's and didn't allow then to advertise or be affiliated with the site, but then when Libra was closed to be finished, they allowed some ads to be put up and were much more lenient with their rules.

China will make its own centralized currency that their government will be able to control. There's no way they let bitcoin get be, the decentralization aspect is too scary.

I doubt satoshi thought his idea would ever get so big, ready to rival governments currencies and likely change the course of history forever, especially with blockchain technology.

I don't think he would consider and care about the government - he wanted and created a peer to peer currency that would be able to escape the government rule and be for everyone to use.

He was 99% anti taxation, so I don't think we can look at BTC transaction fees as his way of taxation, it isn't as much as regular taxes are and goes against his mindset.

Hm... Not so sure about this, I doubt bitcoin can be seen as a very safe investment at all, it's definitely not stable and I doubt a lot of people invested in it because it was the safer option.

If it's crypto that where they want to have their investments in, there are a lot of stablecoins and a lot of other centralized and safer coins, I wonder what's the reason why they picked Bitcoin over other investments.

I reckon we'll see a lot of people place attention and turn to the world of cryptocurrencies with the tensions between China and USA - seeking safe havens.

Another one to the list. Not surprising, Korean is huge with blockchain technology, and even though there were more supportive of blockchain and the decentralization aspects, I recognize that they probably see a very bright future with the use of blockchain technology and they'd love to integrate that technology.

This looks like the closest thing to a blockchain city we have now, you could use a bus or another public service and then get coins for tax with. This'll also help their ID card system, and since they are so advanced and already have scanners at most places, I see a very easy transition into the new technology.

Also looks they are experimenting with contracts with past time workers on the blockchain. Very interesting...

Back a year ago when the price hit 20k and the network was really congested, I started using this website for a way to find out about my transactions and how fast they would confirm. I'd recommend people to use it as well, it shows a lot of interesting information about bitcoin transactions, confirmation times, fees, etc - https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/

This is some interesting statistics though, but I wouldn't say it's massive congestion right now. I'm paying 1-2 dollars a transaction when this time last year I'd be paying over 60 dollars for microtransactions.

If you want low fees though, use segwit and the lightning network. Only technology good enough for micro transactions.

I can agree with this. I think people comparing fiat and BTC's same uses are very premature currently. There was previously conversations made in which BTC was made to replace microtransactions and fiat completely, which at this point is just a huge over-exaggeration. BTC should be the leading crypto and compared to another crypto, but some people will want to make it something it is not (which at this point, a replacement to fiat).

And regarding Libra. It's overall good news for the community. I mean, who thinks that a huge company like Facebook spending time and money into researching and making their own cryptocurrency is a bad thing? It brings a lot more attention, and even though the coin is a stablecoin, it's still done with the blockchain, which is pretty cool.

Yep - the article is just some regular news that's been filled to the brim with over-exaggerations. Waste of time reading it, to be honest.

This sounds like a really weird article. It's like they think they can do anything with AI and machines these days, which is just not the case.

This is still pretty interesting though. 200,000 transactions, what will be the difference between them? Will some be flagged as illegal darknet transactions, and some be flagged as regular ones for the machine to be able to learn from it? This article just seems like putting 2 random buzzwords together to make a big deal.

That might be crazy. I've seen machines be really good at learning patterns and track bank and other transactions via it, this seems like a very possible option, and a very gloomy future for us if it's true.

There are 2 possible ways, I assume for someone to profit off old BTC addresses that are no longer used.

Currently, there are multiple hard forks of Bitcoin, and if you have had 1 BTC from 2015, it's worth a lot more then you actually realize. Let's calculate.

1 BTC is currently - 11,700
1 Bitcoin Cash (which forked 1 August 2017, so if you have an address which had BTC out there, you can redeem it) - $350 currently, if you sold a week from the fork, it would have been 600
1 Bitcoin Gold - $18, would have been 300 if you sold at the fork date (24 October 2017)
1 Bitcoin SV- $160, would have been around 220 at for date (15 November 2018)

If you sold all of BTC forks at their date, you would have made around 1000 USD.  10% of a BTC.

2nd option is some way to lie to the government about owning bitcoin? Some insurance scam maybe?

That depends a lot. Most countries like China, Iran, etc are banning bitcoin due to some of the technology behind it which makes it impossible to control (the decentralization aspect). I doubt any of these countries actually dislike the other technology like a public ledger, blockchains, etc, but they'd much rather ban the coin and make their own controlled option.

Most countries that ban bitcoin are against privacy and decentralization and lack control. Centralized coins like Ethereum aren't really threats to their financial institutions.
It depends on their situation and what they actually do with cryptos, if they fully ban them, or if it's just bitcoin. A clone would likely be banned as well after some time, to be honest.

Look at China's great firewall as an example. They wanted to ban access to western sites, but look how easy it is for users to bypass it. Free vpn, quick 2-minute install, and the firewall is non-existent.

They won't be able to fully ban BTC now though. Countries that have "banned' bitcoin have never caught and punished people for holding it, and they haven't changed anything related to their internet services to ban them from accessing bitcoin-based services, and they have blocked nodes. Even if they did, using TOR and a VPN to avoid it is fairly easy, and bitcoin mixers can hide your address easily.

If they did ban BTC - someone should copy all the tech behind it and make a 1:1 coin to BTC, similar to Timbit's idea. One of those will get big and people will be happy to use.

I don't really see smaller games being more accepting of bitcoin, although I do think it needs to become a must soon. Companies like the one OP posted do all their payments via iTunes and Google Play Store, even though get charged outrageous fees and wait months before their payments are actually received, are very reluctant to change, or even add another payment option (BTC), for some reason.

One gaming payment system I've seen and already respected is G2APay. It's always worked very well for me and allows BTC transactions easily. G2Apay is allowed to be used by almost any company and I'd love to see it go through more adoption.

I'd like to see companies like Steam, Blizzard, Activision, and a lot of more triple AAA game publishers be more accepting of crypto-currencies. They would easily be followed in, and would set a great precedent.

This is a pretty accurate post, most advanced governments are already making moves to turn their society into a cash-less one, where having issues like these (counterfeit cash) would be something of the past. It's way harder to fake online money, then physical cash.

We can already see developments made in the field now - for example, where I live, in the past 5 years there has been a huge increase in card and "tap and go" payment systems. A lot of cash businesses in our area were forced to be able to accept card, or they would go out of business - it's not their product that's the problem, it's that no one carries cash anymore, it's way too inconvenient compared to using your phone or card.

This depends a lot on the governments, we've already seen a lot of progress from mainstream companies like Facebook and countries like China look to work with fiat and crypto side by side, and try bring a lot more regulation to crypto.

Yep - In previous years we've seen a lot of growth in BTC and altcoins, often with altcoins following the recent movement of BTC, but in previous months, BTC market dominance is extremely high, and people are no longer spreading all their coins around the altcoins and holding BTC, but mostly just holding and buying BTC.

Their loss. Typical centralized banks and short-sighted companies who don't understand the technology and will never adopt.

It's not really much news though, the title is very misleading and all it does, is tell us things that we know. Banks will never allow you to buy cash equivalent items with credit cards, which is why the majority of credit cards don't allow you to gamble or buy BTC on them. Banks like control, so it makes sense for Goldman to only regulate and work with stablecoins, although it's very boring.

Neat site!

I love the features I found on it, I tried exporting some of my trades from my personal exchange account and it worked like a charm! I had a look at pricing options and will consider buying it if I choose to use it more. It's a great and neat service, a bit pricy for some of the higher up bundles, but that's understandable.

I read the article that was linked, and it matches the information I found on it from other websites - very well written as well.

I did have a question though. What are the risks if I connect exchange account to the platform? If your platform gets compromised will my exchange account also be lost?

Haha. I agree. Looks like a lot of countries like the ones you mentioned are going through the process of pressuring blockchain technology, and bitcoin due to its decentralization aspect - then they use the same blockchain technology to make their own crypto coin and then make it their own, easily controllable, national cryptocurrency. Could see an Indian and Iranian based crypto coming in the future.

China's digital advancement over the years has been insane. They've dominated a lot of the markets, electronics, payment processors and are now chasing the next big thing - centralized cryptocurrencies, issued by the government.


Very much so. China is investing in cryptocurrency technology is one of the best things an asian investor can hear.

Pretty obvious. No smart criminal will be leaving a trace on bitcoin's public ledger, especially after bitcoin has become so mainstream, and that the government has actually started tracking transactions on the network, especially big ones that could be related to dark-net activity or money laundering.

There are a lot of the ways in the world for people to get around things, offshore bank accounts, faked ID's, accountants. These things can help you avoid a lot of things. Crime has been happening for a long time, without BTC.

Deutsche Bank is a very good example - https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/19/business/deutsche-bank-money-laundering-trump.html

It's not really as much as a problem with needing an APP, it's just the mobile version (or any smaller version for that matter) hasn't been touched, so it just takes the regular site and shrinks it down.

Go on another popular web site, eg cointelegraph for an example. The entire UI is changed and it's formatted in a way that is comfortable. Bitcointalk isn't designed in this way.

A mobile app would be good though. The main issues are with the quote buttons being so hard to use, the overall UI and look of the site on mobile (zooming in and scrolling left and right to see posts is really annoying, personally). An app would be very hard to build to be honest though.