It is also possible that Satoshi Nakamoto knew some academics who could answer some (carefully worded?) questions when he had them. He definitely stayed awake in whatever college-level economics class he took.

The main question here is, can most people afford to run nodes in their basements if the previous incentive for doing so (mining rewards) has been removed? I shall add the tax thing to my reasons that newcomers should consider earning bitcoin and spending bitcoin instead of futzing around with exchanges. Let someone else worry about cashing in and cashing out; you just focus on using bitcoin to make the purchases that you would have made anyway.

It might be preferable if the Chinese government was flexible enough to let its citizens stay involved, but Bitcoin can survive without China. It would just require some rearranging of resources and/or a willingness to put up with reduced hashrate for the short term until somebody else picks up the ball. China can't be the only country with cheap electricity.

I will agree that things like drugs, gambling and porn can be damaging to society, but this is not what Bitcoin was created for. Bitcoin works best as a counter to the, "If you have nothing to hide, then you should have nothing to fear" mentality of mainstream financial centers and regulators. If you earned $1000 in cash mowing lawns for people and now you want to use that cash to have a new sink installed, then that should be between you, Home Depot, and the guy who installs your sink. But because civil forfeiture is a thing, the cops can seize that cash without cause just by accusing you of being a small-time drug dealer. Bitcoin can sidestep that to a certain degree if you do not advertise that you have Bitcoin. Then you just have to buy a Home Depot gift card with Bitcoin and either learn how to install the sink yourself or find a contractor who is willing to accept Bitcoin. The cops might find the briefcase in your trunk anyway, but you can fill that with last week's stale doughnuts from your office as a joke.

If it was me, I'd remind her to make sure that she's comfortable with possibly losing $30 and tell her that you'll buy it from her at the current market rate if she ever want to sell, and then send her $30 worth of Bitcoin out of my own wallet. That way, nobody has to mess with the exchange fees and she gets $30 worth of Bitcoin.

And for the people saying that old people don't get Bitcoin, I'd just say that there are plenty of young people who don't get Bitcoin and wouldn't give a rip if there was a way to make Bitcoin sexy and cool to the non-tech savvy people.

CloudOne1, I have a case for you that involves stolen Ethereum tokens. PM'd you. (If your fees are reasonable, I can settle up in Bitcoin.)

I shall ask; thanks!

Enough to annoy me, and I bet he hacked the private key somehow. But it isn't really about the money, as far as I'm concerned, other than the fact that I have a few investments and some stuff from bounty campaigns that I had plans for. I can bump up the bounty if I have to, and when I get a few payments I'm expecting. The important thing to me is getting that guy shut down.

It was definitely stolen.

I shall give $100 in Bitcoin to whomever can provide information leading to the arrest of owner(s) of Ethereum address 0x89474953d6bC8275B88e331fDf1A92d552563712 This address stole Ethereum and tokens from me.

You're right to be worried. My suggestion is to download a Bitcoin wallet and transfer the Bitcoin into it so that you don't have to worry about a third party about Blockchain.info suddenly disappearing.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/man-in-michigan-prosecuted-for-selling-bitcoin

According to local news media reports, a Michigan man named Bradley Anthony Stetkiw has been charged by local authorities for operating an unlicensed money transmitting business. The charges have been filed in US District Court.

Yeah. He was selling Bitcoin on Localbitcoins.

I don't do a ton of investing outside of cryptocurrencies, but I've gotten into ETH and I'm considering a few ICOs that I think are interesting. (I will, of course, sometimes needle one ICO or another by implying that I won't invest more than $10 in something that I'm moderately skeptical about, or that has a roadmap that puts the launch more than six months out, because how do I know that members of the development team won't get bored and walk away.)

I would not say that Bitcoin has no real world value when it has made some early adopters rich. Some of them may not have been charity cases before, but would they have gained as much by sticking to traditional investments? Probably not. One thing I'd like to see more of is bootstrapping Blockchain and cryptocurrencies for bringing the unbanked up to the level where they can compete on world markets. We like to talk about how Bitcoin can do that, but where's the application beyond a few jobs sites?

Link them to reputable websites that show that "money" is not backed by gold and hasn't been for decades. (It isn't in the U.S., anyway.) It's just backed by government promises, which won't mean anything if the government collapses or is overrun.

I'd prefer that this get settled in a more-or-less amicable fashion. More importantly, both sides should start listening to one another about what they want to get out of this. Ordinary users will likely just care that Bitcoin keep its promise of being a cheap, fast, secure, relatively anonymous alternative to banks that can't shut down on them just because some bean counter at a bank got nervous.

Sure, banks could be pretty good about pinning down illegal activity if they bothered to exert themselves beyond the legally required CYA maneuvers. But don't assume that they even care about who uses their banks, and for what purposes, as long as they can profit off of it. Bitcoin at least leaves an unassailable "paper trail" that can be followed by anyone who cares about pinning down any given transaction.

Political? Maybe in the sense that there will always be "politics" involved in anything that includes a group of people, and that's true whether you're talking about a government or an office. But I'd call Bitcoin a politically neutral technology in the sense that it doesn't really care about who uses it. Libertarian free market supporters like it because it can be used to get around regulation and dodge the morality police to a certain degree. I could even see left-wingers, the ones who genuinely care about things like civil rights and equality rather than just using those terms like stone clubs to get their way anyhow, liking it because Bitcoin does not care about race, religion, sexual orientation, or national origin. If people have manipulated it for their own profit, they're usually the big players who have something to gain by creating chaos.

I would rather call Bitcoin an experiment to see if a decentralized system that can't be controlled by any single party can be viable in the long run. Though the best case scenario I'm seeing right this second is that the implosion of Bitcoin will be controlled in such a way that alternatives with extra useful features, like Ethereum, are not hurt very badly in the long run and there are perhaps two or three competing decentralized services in each niche so that one can continue if another collapses.

Look for alternatives to plain buying and selling bitcoins. Or, as I like to put it, let someone else worry about how to liquidate bitcoins and you just find ways to use bitcoin at venues where you would normally use a credit card or Paypal. (My number one purchase with bitcoin is electronic gift cards.)