Off the top of my head I can think of at least two sources for meaningful financial incentives that both are in play in the cryptocurrency scene:

1. ICOs
I know most of these are motivated by greed and the easier execution compared to traditional security offerings. However, they could theoretically
be used to fund development of projects. This is already happening with some Ethereum related projects that intend to offer an ICO to pay
for future development.

The most prominent example probably being Raiden:
https://www.coindesk.com/raiden-ico-ethereum-scaling-solution-launch-publicly-traded-token/

2. Incentive due to own coin holdings
Many Bitcoin or altcoin developers are sitting on a huge stash of their respective cryptocurrency of choice. This means that they are directly incentivized
to improve the protocol, because any improvements would likely increase adoption (or at least prevent the fall of adoption or people switching to a more
innovative competitor), which would increase the value of their coins. Let´s say Bitcoin Core developer X has been in Bitcoin for years and has accumulated a
ton of Bitcoins. He has a direct incentive to ensure the security of the Bitcoin code, because such a high percentage of his overall wealth is stored in Bitcoin.

This is basically the same concept that is responsible for Capitalism working so well - or at least better than other systems that have been tried in the history
of mankind. People following their own self-interest ironically creates effects that are beneficial for society as a whole.

Besides, donations are another source of potential financial incentives. However, these are not really meaningful for most projects, because of the low percentage
of people that actually donates to open source projects.

This article just illustrates the lack of Frederic Oudea´s understanding of Bitcoin.

If I would be a criminal the last thing that I would want is for my transactions to be stored on an immutable ledger that
is stored for eternity. Cash is much better for illegal transactions related to crime than Bitcoin transactions. This
is especially true for larger amounts of money that are increasingly hard to liquidate without having access to an exchange
or a OTC trading desk. Both of these "exit gateways" require extensive verification if you want to cash out non negligible amounts,
which again makes it unappealing for people with nefarious purposes.

I agree with your sentiment.

I had to laugh especially hard at the following part of the article:

They are not even hiding that they will issue the digital Uruguayan peso at will by hinting at additional issuance rounds.
This news would be great if they would have implemented a hard cap or at least a fixed issuance schedule, which ideally
would resemble the asymptotic issuance of Bitcoins. Instead they did what CryptoBry pointed out, which will probably
cause this project to be a huge failure, which will be forgotten in next to no time.

I don´t share the same optimism regarding Lightning. The technology is great and very talented developers are working on it.
However, I have read in various sources that the actual launch is still more than a year away.

As we all know, development roadmaps are prone to postponements (hey, Ethereum  ) due to unforeseen issues and
extensive testing before releasing the code. This could indicate even longer delays until the Lightning network
is actually live and available for use.

After all, I think the fee situation will improve in the next weeks, because several malicious actors that have been
spamming the blockchain have lost the incentive to do this due to Segwit2x being called off.

The Bitstamp debit card has no foreign exchange fee, they use the spot exchange rates of the debit card provider.

However, they have a purchase fee (0.35 $), which is rather unusual for a debit card. Usually, only ATM
withdrawals incur fees with most Bitcoin debit card providers, while Bitstamp also charges for
in-store purchases (the same fee even applies to online purchases using the debit card).

I would agree with that statement if you would include a condition that the "something that people use as money" must be scarce.

If you take a look into monetary history you will see that things like shells were only used as a medium of exchange in regions
where shells were incredibly scarce (= hundreds of miles away from the next shore). Consequently, shells would have been
useless in regions where shells are found in abundance and therefore they never gained any traction as a medium of exchange
in these parts of the world.

This is also one of the reasons why gold continues to store value after thousands of years. Even if the annual global output of gold would be doubled, the impact
on the global supply would be negligible (the current annual output of gold is not even 2 % of the already distributed supply). Obviously, it is
incredibly difficult to ramp up the mining of gold, because resources are scarce and often located in politically unstable parts of the world.

I´d like to apply for your Signature Campaign.

Bitcointalk Username: Samarkand
Rank: Full Member
Current post count: 409
BTC Address: 15z5AZoEMkorbjgGfMUxEEZFpAhVjSaq3o

Thank you in advance for considering my application.

I think you are overestimating the leeway that the exchanges like Coinbase/GDAX or Bitflyer have regarding the decision to which chain
they assign the "BTC" ticker in the case of a chain split. Several investors and core developers have already announced their decision
to sue the exchanges that give the "BTC" ticker to the new Segwit2x chain.

If they were indeed to assign the "BTC" ticker to the Segwit2x chain, they would probably face a huge backslash and several expensive litigations,
because the user support for the hard fork is just not that big (keep in mind that the NYA is a kind of a backroom deal in the first place).

Besides, I think the whole scaling debate is way overblown, because network congestion actually is a feature in my opinion and not a bug.
A competitive fee market requires occasional congestion of the network/mempool, which is particularly relevant for the time in the future
when the block reward is negligible and the incentives of the miners are largely determined by the transaction fees.

It amazes me everytime how Satoshi got all the incentives right from the start. This guy (or the group of guys behind the pseudonym) is as close
to true genius as it gets.

Further reading:
https://helda.helsinki.fi/bof/bitstream/handle/123456789/14912/BoF_DP_1727.pdf;jsessionid=D762A63DC58856EF904C0C46421871BE?sequence=1

The paper stresses the argument that occasional network congestion actually is a feature and not a bug.

The NY Times recently ran a story about the Centra Card ICO and the guys behind this scheme:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/27/technology/how-floyd-mayweather-helped-two-young-guys-from-miami-get-rich.html

I would strongly advise against participating in the ICOs that make use of celebrity endorsements in order to
shill their tokens. Additionally, many people are in it only to profit from the ICO frenzy without having
a working product. Even the hugely hyped TenX and Monaco ICOs haven´t delivered a working product
as far as I know.

I´d like to apply for your Signature Campaign!

Bitcointalk Username: Samarkand
Rank: Full Member
Current post count: 406
BTC Address: 15z5AZoEMkorbjgGfMUxEEZFpAhVjSaq3o

Unfortunately, I think you already missed the chance to take advantage of Bitcoin Gold. This is not even Nitrogensports
fault in this situation, because the Bitcoin Gold developers took the snapshot of the BTC chain several days ago already (even more
than a week ago I think, but I need to look up the correct date).

This implies that even if Nitrogensports would have processed your withdrawal early enough - or instantly - you wouldn´t be able
to claim Bitcoin Gold. You can only hope that Nitrogen decides to honor the balances of every user at the time of the snapshot, because
I assume that you had a positive balance at Nitrogensports during the snapshot.

I´d like to notify you that I´m leaving the 777Coin Signature Campaign.
I will remove the signature and the avatar after this post.

Thank you for running the campaign in a very professional way. I never had any problems with
you during the duration of my participation in this campaign. Keep up the good work! 

If I understand the article correctly, the author is suggesting that Bitfinex themselves - or at least people
affiliated to the management of Bitfinex - are the people doing the wash trading.
Therefore these are not your regulars customers that are subject to the standard Bitfinex
fee structure.

However, wash trading is not that expensive even for regular customers if you take a look at the Bitfinex fee structure:
https://www.bitfinex.com/fees

After trading more than 7,5 million $ in the last 30 days, you have already reached a tier
that allows you to pay nothing in Maker fees. This implies that you would basically be only paying
the commission once (not twice as you said) for fulfilling your own order.

If you get back to my initial conjecture, you can easily expect that someone affiliated with Bitfinex management in some
way would probably be able to get an account that doesn´t pay any fees at all, which would make
wash trading essentially free.

I´ve been using Bitfinex for a long time, but I still don´t trust them 100 %. There is a reason why exchanges
like Bitstamp have restricted themselves to a few cryptocurrencies while Bitfinex has been busy adding shitcoins like
Eidoo or Aventus.

Betting volume has come to a halt in the last few days. I remember looking at the website
nearly a week ago and then Betking had roughly 23 BTC in site profit (only counting
the BTC wagers, I don´t follow ETH and LTC wagers). Today the site profit is roughly at the
same level.

Where have all the whales gone? Is the main reason for the decline in betting turnover the really
high BTC value? Who wants to wager 1 BTC or more when it is already more than 6000$ per
Bitcoin?

In Germany you can buy food using Bitcoin from the EDEKA online store:
https://www.edeka-lebensmittel.de/

Like most other merchants they obviously work with BitPay. Usually it works pretty great,
unless the network is really congested due to a spamattack. Then the recommended fees get
really out of line and make this a rather uninteresting payment option.

Thank you for the fast reply.

However, I´m still confused, because if I access the payment page of your website I see a 0.05 BTC minimum deposit for Bitcoin deposits:
https://www.asianconnect88.com/payments/

At the current BTC exchange rate 0.05 BTC is roughly ~300$, which is obviously a lot more than 100 €.
Is the website out of date?

Unfortunately, I´m not joking. The 162 sign-up fee actually is already a discount from the original
sign-up fee of 180 $. I concede that this is quite the money grab and much higher than at every other
debit card provider (e.g. Bitwala has a 8 € sign-up fee).

Thank you for the reply!
How high is the minimum deposit if I decide to try out Asianodds? I would be depositing with Bitcoin.

I expect that they will handle it similar to the BCC/BCH fork. Therefore I would suggest that you move
your funds out of Bitfinex early enough and take control of your own private keys.

By doing this, you ensure that you will get 100% of all upcoming fork coins and don´t have to worry about
exchanges using obscure calculations to decide how many S2X coins you get awarded.
This should be a no-brainer for you as you already made a bad experience with Bitfinex with the previous fork.

The fork will happen in rougly 4000 blocks, therefore you can expect it to happen in the middle
of November.

http://bashco.github.io/2x_Countdown/

On this link you can find a countdown until the actual fork date.