I would ask a really similar, but yet different question: ...for how long you can buy with credit card....
Banks and credit card companies are just making harder and harder to buy bitcoin with credit card, they have an official communication why they are doing this (restricting people from buying bitcoin, to prevent them from the possible future losses....) First step was that they have raised the fee of the credit card payment, if the payment is in connection with cryptos. After some banks has already banned their customers, they don't let them buy bitcoin with the credit card. Not sure what's next but it seems that it's not just about taking care of people...

Lightning network is not yet here officially. It works on the test network, and the number of the LN nodes and connections on the mainnet are growing day by day but it's still a testing period, so this won't affect the transaction fees directly. Segwit is the thing that has an effect on the transaction fees, as if more and more wallets are using segwit, the transactions would get smaller then before, so one block would contain more transactions like before, so the price of getting into a block (tx fee) will become lower a bit. Also, as already mentioned here, Christmas was a really busy period of the year, so now there are less people who want to send a transaction, this also makes the tx fee lower.

What if banks will start to deal with bitcoin, but like an escrow, or like someone who saves the coins for you? I mean, they will offer their customers that they will keep and take a good care the bitcoin people are sending to the bank and people will be happy that the bitcoins are safe at the bank.
The reason I'm saying this is that there are a lot of people who have no clue about bitcoin and also a lot of people who have already read about bitcoin but they are not comfortable with it, they are scared by the new technology, etc...
People are not yet fully ready for the P2P payment transactions, because they haven't experienced it yet, unfortunately. (The saddest thing is, that I'm sure if Facebook implements a P2P payment system in the future, people will use it in two weeks time like they were doing that since they were born...)
Crypto people use the exchanges (otherwise exchanges would close down, if nobody was brave enough to store their coins on the exchange), they store their coins at the exchange, so why the average people would not trust the banks to store their coins...

KYC can be good and bad at the same time. There are some advantages if an exchange can prove that they're not financing terrorists and they work according to the law, this makes them trustable and this can be a real advantage. (But this is not their decision, they're forced to implement these kind of regulations). Also, KYC can have negative impact as well (and now I'm not talking about giving out data to tax authorities), because exchanges are usually got hacked and it's possible that the hackers are not only steal the bitcoins or any kind of cryptos but the ID verification data as well (which can be also really valuable on the appropirate market).

This support of a technology giant is really needed these days... If they see potential in mining chips, the people should also see the potential in bitcoin as well... At least they can stop antminer to be a monopoly in connection with mining. I'm just wondering what will happen to the VGA mining rigs if Samsung starts to pour their chips on the market? Someone will buy them and will build cheaper mining equipment, compared to antminer's and a more efficient compared to VGAs. Maybe VGAs will be the mining equipment of alts only (or they are already). Because of the bitcion price correction, VGA rigs are on sale now on ebay and other similar sites, so gamers will be happy, they can buy cheaper high end cards into their PCs soon...

That time the wallets were mainly (or only) desktop wallets, so you need to search your old hard drives for something in connection with bitcoin. (If you find a file called wallet.dat, you're half way there). The other possibility that you have created a paper wallet to store the bitcoins, that's the hardest way to find it, if you have moved or you are a kind of person who usually throw out old things, if so, there's a little hope.
Or, if you have saved your public and private key to a .txt file those days, you can also search for those. (that time there were no malwares looking for your keys, so there were no problem storing them on your hard drive). Good luck!

I have no information about the Ledger Blue. If it's using the same app in Chrome, it's possible that the malware is able to change the receiving address of the Blue as well. Anyway, it helps if you double check the address on the device's screen as well, in the Chrome app. If you're using it with MEW, I've no info about the possibility of chechking the address on the device if you're connected to MEW.

The specific issue is about credit card purchases, debit card and wire transfer is OK for them. Banks are against cryptocurrencies because of various reasons, the reason of this credit card ban is the volatility of the prices. Just imagine that someone buys bitcoin with a credit card at $10,000 and the price drops to $8,000. At the end of the month, the person needs to repay the credit card debt but because of the $2,000 price difference, it's not possible (or not easily possible). Banks don't want to run the risk of this, so Lloyds has decided to ban the crypto related transactions in connection with the credit card. If you use a debit card, you spend your own money, so it's not a real problem for the bank, it's only if you spend their money with the credit card.

It's a receive attack, means that a malware try to change the receiving address of your wallet when it shows on the screen (and changes it to a hacker's address), in order to copy and paste the hacked address when you want to receive bitcoins into your wallet. When you use the chrome bitcoin application, you can click on a small button on the screen which shows the receiving address on the Ledger Nano S device itself, so if you check the two addresses you won't lose any bitcoin. So it's not a malware that completly wipes your hardware wallet but just hijacks the bitcoins you want to receive into the wallet.

Just don't forget that the price of bitcoin has also decreased, not only the fees... I usually don't use USD or EUR in connection with the fee, and the common (and easily understandable) sat/B is also a bit misleading because you can't be sure what will be the size of your transaction in bytes. The sat/B is a good indicator about the current trend for the fees, but based on the specific transaction the fee calculated in USD or EUR can vary a lot.
Personally I would prefer higher fees with the $20k USD bitcoin price, because LN will come sooner or later and will solve the fee problem...

Thanks for the hint, I've found a thread about the calculation of the personal activity point of ranking to legendary:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1269370.msg13133378#msg13133378
So it means it's a simple sha1 hash generated from the userID and some secret salt that's unknown...
And the first two hex characters of this hash are converted back to decimal and added to the 775 activity points, this equals the personal activity point needed to rank up.
Without the salt, it's really unpredictable, so there's no need to think about it any longer. Anyway, merits would be harder to gather, it seems. Thanks everyone for the answers!

Guys, please help me out, I'm missing a piece of information in connection with the activity and the merit system.
If everything happens well in the near future, in a months time I'll have a chance to rank up to legendary (was working for it long time ago). In 2 activity periods, I'll have the necessary 775 activity points to have a _chance_ to rank up. I know that to become a legendary, it's different to every account, it's also possible, that I have to wait for the 1030 activity points. I guess no one can tell me how much activity points I need to have to rank up.
My question is: The necessary activity points to rank up (between 775 and 1030) are already decided when an account on this forum is created, or it's changing every day, every activity period or for whatever reason?
I'm just curious because it matters if I have to gather the remaining 464 merits in 4 weeks time (more than 100 merits per week) or just later on. Is it possible to check somewhere if I have reached the necessary activity points to rank up and I'm only waiting for the merits?
Thanks for your help!

Rule of the thumb: If you don't have the private key (safely), the bitcoins are not yours, but that person owns them who owns the private key itself.
So if you want to go with a broker, think twice before you act. If you send your coins to the broker, there's a chance that they will run away with your coins and noone will be able to get them back to you. If you want to use an exchange to exchange e.g. bitcoin to altcoins or vice versa, do it really quickly and transfer your coins out from the exchange (withdraw) quickly and store it in cold storage. Google (or search this forum) about cryptocurrency security advices, because this is a kind of lesson everyone have to learn.

There's no need to cash out their bitcoin, because bitcoin is not their official currency, so it's not included in the country's financial numbers. There's no difference for them if bitcoin goes up or down in the short term, because if they don't plan with it, they won't be affected if price changes. On the long run, they will be able to make profit out of it, if they hold it for some time and after the price of bitcoin starts to increase again. If they can manage to run their country without selling the bitcoins, it makes sense to hold and wait for some major price increase.

This is good news, but you should check the Lightning Network whitepaper or do some google search to learn about the LN. This won't be combined with the bitcoin, but this is a new solutioin which uses the main bitcoin network only for the opening and closing the channels of LN. These channels will enable the quick and cheap transactions, and the bitcoin main blockchain transactions are only needed if the channels are running out of available funds or there's a need to close them. As long as the channels have transactions in both directions, there's no need to transact on the main bitcoin network, this is why it makes cheaper and quicker to do micro transactions on the LN.

I used to check bitcoin transaction fee structure on blockchain.info, here:
https://blockchain.info/charts/mempool-state-by-fee-level
Now it shows this:

which is a bit unbelievable to me.

So I've started to google for fee charts, I've got this:
https://bitcoinfees.earn.com
This chart is  totally different:


So I've checked fork.lol, where I usually check the average tx fee chart:
https://fork.lol/tx/fee (second tab, Tx fee)
This shows that the current average fee is 76.26 sat/B (the average).
It seems that something is wrong with the blockchain.info chart, but I don't know what. Maybe they can't deal with segwit transaction type? Does the blockchain.info chart show the same to everyone else?

Forgotten or lost wallets will be a problem as long as people won't care about their bitcoins equal to their real life money. I know you can't put your hard dirve into a safe box (but a backup hard drive can be put into it). Also, people have to learn how to deal with bitcoin. Dealing with fiat money is really simple, you learn it from your parents, or from other people, but you can't learn to deal with bitcoin from the family and you don't learn it in the school. Those lost bitcoins were lost when the technology was really new and people didn't care about them much, because it had much less value. If the bitcoin price was $1,000 or more that time people would care about their bitcoins much more.

Governments' (major) income is the tax. The currency of the tax is the country's own fiat currency. People in the country get their salary in the fiat currency and they buy the everyday things and store their savings in the fiat currency as well. Governments have control over their own fiat currency, and over the tax income. As soon as people will start to use bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency (which the governments can't control) they will get less income in taxes, that will cause problems in the country, this is why the governments are against cryptos. Banks work with the fiat currencies as well. They are allowed to 'create' money out of thin air (giving out credit to the people or to the companies). They are strictly controlled by the goverment, in order to only create as much fiat from loans and credits that don't endanger the country's fiscal policy. If bitcoin or another cryptocurrency will come and take a share from the B2B or B2C transactions, banks and the government can't be sure about the maximum amount of fiat that can be used in the country, and if the overall fiat amount in the country will be more then enough, it will start an inflation of the fiat itself, that's what countries want to avoid.

If you really want to go cheap but want to make sure that the transaction will get confirmation soon, just send it with 11 or a bit more sat/B fee. This is cheap enough (if your transaction has one input and one output), and if your transaction has a fee higher than 10 sat/B, you can try to accelerate it with the ViaBTC accelerator. If you cannot accelerate it, you can ask for acceleration here or in the services section and someone may help you to get your transaction confirmed.
Take a look at this chart, it's easier to understand, they show the current regular and priority fee to use.
https://blockchain.info/charts/mempool-state-by-fee-level

I was wondering about buying one of these coins a few years before (the price of bitcoin was under $1,000 that time). Now it sees it would have been a good idea to buy, but now I don't want to buy, price has raised too much to pay 10x more for the same coin. Maybe it's possible to buy one from a collector of from someone who want to sell it, but it's hard to find one and if you find one you cannot be sure that that's not a scam, so it doesn't worth the effort for me yet to get a coin like that. This can change in the future of course, or someone else will start to produce similar coins again to be able to buy them directly.