And ASICs are usign way less juice compared to supercomputers Anyway, I don't catch the point, the supercomputer was a part of the nuclear power plant, or the nuclear power plant was needed to feed the supercomputer with energy?
What I always quote in connection with russia and bitcoin that last year one of their bigger cities was trying to invite the chinese miners, offered to re-open their old dodgy nuclear power plant to feed the ASICs farms and the climate is so cold that the airco is not needed to run the mining farms, it's enough to open the windows

It was just a quick example to show that there's no need to open channels with 1-2 BTC, it's possible to open channels with less, 0.01 or similar for TESTING purposes, which is the current status of the LN on the mainnet. This is just for test the code, to start and receive small transactions, to test the network, and find the possible bugs. Even a small Raspberry PI is enough for this NOW.
But when this whole thing will go live and start to work as expected, there will be a real need for channels to be opened with a lot of BTC if you want to let larger transactions to find your LN hub, or if you want to serve a lot of small transactions (in one way). If you can set up a channel where the transactions are going in both directions, then you will never have to close the channel because of insufficient liquidity. As far as I see now, LN will not be the channel of the high amount transactions but the lot of small transactions, so if someone wants to only participate with smaller channels, it's possible (but we'll see if it worths it on the long run to open a channel with really small amount).

It seems interesting Was it a one time action, (to give the 500 additional merits to those who has reached the 775 activity these days), or it will continue? If it was a one time thing, I would really miss that 1 activity period that made me miss this chance... But that's life

Don't be disappointed, really, it could always be worse 250 merits are a lot of course, but not impossible, it's just the question of time, but not 10 years...
You can check my activities, I'm 5 activity points away from having a chance to rank up to be a Legendary but still missing nearly 500 merits. Problem? No. I was expected to become a legendary sometime this year. Merit system kicked in, so maybe next year, that's life.
You are a senior, so you have all the chances to enjoy the benefits of your rank, the forum and of course bitcoin.
If you make quality posts and somehow you won't get merited, you can still search the forum, there are several threads where high ranked members are helping those who are eligible for the merits, based on the post history and post quality. And be patient, that really helps

Why to be top 15%? Makes no sense for me. Do you think that it will be only the top 15% who can earn on the (really small) transaction fees of the lightning network? If there will be fees at all in the beginning? Guys are running LN nodes on Raspberry PIs and opening channels with the amount of 0,01 or 0,05 BTC just for testing purposes now, so to start a node and be the part of the network is not a big deal at the moment. Maybe in the future there will be a need for big and reliable nodes to route the transactions with a high amount of BTC, but to maintain a bigger hub will cost real money and this will make the node to charge you higher fees compared to the average (or compared to 0 fees). If they will charge higher fees, the protocol will search for another route where your transaction will arrive with less fees. Or, if it's a really higher amount (not a coffee or a weekend shopping) and no hurry, the good old onchain transaction will be also an option still. So there's nothing with banks and giant nodes but an onion type network that will have real possibilities.

This had been already discussed somewhere here in the Bitcoin Discussion thread. Leaving Paypal for Ebay does not mean theat they will start to accept Bitcoin, despite of that the new (or one of the possible new) payment service providers (payment processors) has the possibility to accept bitcoin payments. Fees are low at the moment but unless the lightning network starts officially and works as expected, these giant merchants like eBay won't start with crytos. If the LN will start and work as expected, it will change a lot of things on the market.

Seems a good reason...


If they create their own crypto, they can back the value like they back the value of the digital money (money at bank accounts). If they can control the amount of their crypto, that'll work as the current digital money. Now government contol the banks to limit the amount of the money in the circulation, so if they can control the amount of the crypto coins, that's all good for them. The new crypto will only be a new route for the money in the circulation (Cash, bank system, new crypto system). If governments will issue the cryto money, they can leave out the banks, so it can affect the profit of the banks (they will not be happy).

I'm just wondering, what is the reason to develop a coin for the government? What will be the difference between the new government issued crypto coin and the current digital fiat? Maybe they plan to leave out VISA and MasterCard from the payment chain and governments want to make some profit as their own payment processors. Or, they want to leave out the banks as well, to take their profit as well, because they will be able to handle the payments directly with their new blockchain based government coin?

That's for sure, when you have your limit, it meas you are good for that amount of credit, because of your credit history, your incomes, your spending habits and your payback habits, etc...
Banks allow you to spend their money by that limit, because according to their system, you're able to handle that amount of debt. So this means you can spend that amount of money (buying anything, or just cashing out the money from an ATM and you can even literally throw the money into a river from the bridge...) banks don't care, because according to their calculations, you are able to pay back that amount of money from your future incomes...

Or, they are not afraid from crypto yet, and if they let the customers to buy crypto with credit card, they can reach a lot of new customers from a special segment. Maybe these people were  not using a credit card at all before, so they have found a market gap to fill...
Anyway, it depends a lot on the person's own risk management skills, if he/she is willing to use the credit card for a maximum amount he/she is able to repay in time... it's possible to buy just a little crypto with credit card, and if someone can't resist to go into debt, there's no need to buy crypto with the credit card, it's easy to get into serious debt without crypto as well...

It's (like everything) about trying to earn the most with the less effort... There's no use to hack a person's account (secured with 2FA, scrambled password, etc...) because they put a lot of effort into it, and they can just steal on person's bitcoins (or alts). When it's about an exchange, the situation is similar, they need to find something that's vulnerable, but this time they will have the all of the coins (all the users's coins). It's much better for the hackers, so it's understandable that they're trying to hack exchanges instead of everyday people. For the average joe's, there are the phishing attachs, where the people are sending their login details to the hackers...

If mining companies move to Iceland, they should be really cautious with the internet connection, because Iceland is an island, so if some Tree huggers cut the internet cable at the bottom of the sea, just to sabotage the minig farms, they should have a plan B to connect to the network (I know that the worst case scenario could be a satellite based internet connection, but anyway )
I just remember that at the end of last year there were news about Russia, where they offered to re-open an already closed old nuclear plant to feed the mining farms with energy, and also they have highlighted that the climate is pretty cool for the miners (it's freezing in the summer too)

If you have bought as much bitcoin that makes you worry about the investment, first go and buy a hardware wallet (Trezor or Ledger Nano S) and transfer your bitcoin to the hardware wallet. Don't store your coins on the exchange, unless you want to trade with all of them. It's always better to diversify but that doesn't mean that to diversify between exhanges. Paper wallet is also OK but it needs some reading but hardware wallets work  out of the box.
To be ontopic a bit:
It seemed to be dead as a currency at last Christmas, but since the price and the tx fee has fallen and now if you use SegWit address, you can manage to send your transactions with reasonable fees. If you have time, you can try lower fees too like 10 sat/B, because I think the ViaBTC accelerator is running empty these days... so if your 10 sat/B transaction won't confirm in a few hours, you can still try to accelerate it.
On the long run, wait a bit until Lightning network gets widespread and the micro transactions (coffee, newspaper, etc) will run with fees close to zero. Devs needs some time but fortunately now the network is better than in December 2017.

Is it really OK to pay the taxes in bitcoin? Why not just pay it in USD as always, and hold your bitcoin? Your USD won't worth twice, three times or so more in a years time, but bitcoin could. So if you hold your bitcoins, and you think the price of the bitcoin will go up, it's better to pay the taxes in USD and save your coins. But, if you have to pay the tax when the bitcoin is overvalued, you can use it and after when a correction comes, you can buy back those bitcoins cheaper. So paying taxes in bitcoin seems a bit trading/gambling for me, you can win a lot and also lose a lot because of the bitcoin price...

OK, since last evening I had a look at some of the above mentioned bitcoin debit cards.... (and now I have realized that on the website cryptocompare.com they only marked the debit cards affected by the VISA WaveCrest ban, but the remaining cards are also affected partly, by the VISA and MasterCard ban.)
Just two examples:
AdvCash: it seems available in the cryptocompare.com listing, but checking the bitcointalk.org thread https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1011381.1380 it seems that now this debit card is also closed and users can only withdraw their funds from the card, before it terminates in Feb.2018.
PayCent: it seems that they have closed down the former card and a new card is about to start now, but it's not the traditional bitcoin debit card
So it seems it's better to do your own research if you want to use a bitcoin debit card and this forum seems to be the best place to find information about your preferred card.

This is only the matter of the margin per purchase, if they make the customers pay a margin that is high enough to cover the chargebacks (and not all of the credit card holders will start a chargeback after the purchase) they can make profit at the end. They can also ban their customers from paying with credit card after the first charegeback. Also, they can make a limit for the credit card purchases to maximize the possible loss of the chargebacks.
Of course, they can't apply a really high margin because in that case the price won't be acceptable for the customers, so it's not easy to plan and to calculate.

In the last few weeks you can experience that the transfers are not expensive anymore and they are not slow anymore, becuase the current fees are 100 times less then it was at the end of last year (it was about 600 sat/B that time, now a 5 sat/B transaction gets into the second or third block without any hassle and with a bit of luck...) Also, the price of bitcoin has become lower and this also reduces the fees. So as long as the bitcoin network is in this ideal state, lightning network developers has a little extra time to continue the development of the project.

Protecting the data, and not only from the hackers, who wants to steal data, but imagine that the bank (or any other company) are using blockchain technology to store their data decentralized. Imagine that a server gets infected with a ransomware virus, and they are forced to pay a ransom in order to release the data. If they're using the blockchain, the data is kept on several other servers, so they just shut down the infected server and the system is still running. Also, if the blockchain system is well developed, it can easily reduce the cost of the current labour. Bank clerks has already lost their jobs in the '90s when the PCs started to spread...

Just an interesting side note:
In the EU there are some countries where you cannot buy a national lottery ticket (worths approximately 1 EUR each) with your credit card. Meanwhile you can use your debit card at the same place. Of course, where you can buy the national lottery ticket, you can also do sportsbet and other similar things (gambling), so credit cards are not allowed to use for gambling. (In order to prevent gamblers from serious debt, if the bets go wrong.)
Now it seems that it's a good precedent for them to do the same with bitcoin...

I've just run thru the 53 offered cards, I thought it will be a hard work to check them all... But because of VISA's ban on WaveCrest, most of the cards are not available at the moment, so there are 19 remaining cards to choose from, so it's a bit easier to check them one by one.
(Originally there were 53 cards, 46 issued by VISA and 7 by MasterCard. There were 25 USD cards, 16 EUR and the remaining 12 are GBP.)
If we don't think that the card offering wallets will be able to find another card issuer company in the near future, we only need to check the reamaining 19 cards:

It seems that for GBP currency there are only 2 cards. EUR: 4, USD: 13
If you want some anonimity (at least on medium level) and also instant topups, you can select only WageCan card for both currencies (I don't know the card, so I cannot say anything about it).
So the list is pretty short, compared to the times before the VISA ban...