1. Technically you can choose to not pay any fees. Obviously no wallet allows you to do this because the transaction will never confirm but it's feasible, devs don't have to do it.
2. Not possible. Such a change would go against the fundamentals of Bitcoin and wouldn't have any support.

What makes you think that it is mandatory for every single cryptocurrency that exists to be decentralized?
Sure it may make a mockery of decentralization itself because it is involved with banks, but that doesn't make it less of a valid cryptocurrency than Bitcoin.
Ripple solves a very widespread problem and is thus a great currency even if it's not decentralized.

Fantastic. Now I have the option to automatically pay 10% more of the products' value in mining fees in yet another store.
While on paper it's good news for Bitcoin, I don't think anyone is going to buy from them or anyone else using it at this point.

It will be implemented when it's ready. There are no estimates from the developers yet, but I personally think it will happen sometime in 2018 or early 2019 at the latest.
It is already possible to do Lightning transactions on the Bitcoin testnet so it's reasonable to assume that we're not that far off from an official mainnet release.

Bitcoin's price is still up ~50% from the 20th of November and yet everyone is panicking, why?
Here's the chart:

This clearly shows that Bitcoin was about $8.2K 30 days ago. Current price is still 13K.
From now on even if the price drops to a whopping 10% of the current price, a 90% drop that is, it would still be higher than the price at the beginning of the year.

The Bitcoin blockchain, despite its imperfections, is the most secure blockchain there is to day, and it can evolve.
All other coins would crumble if they faced the same circumstances that Bitcoin is currently facing.

Bitcoin can't evolve as fast as other coins because there are no centralized entities to make decisions for it and thus everyone has to reach consensus to move forward or nothing happens. It took us a year to get SegWit and services aren't even adopting it.

If let's say Litecoin was the #1 coin, there would still be interests and politics involved just as there is with Bitcoin today.

Should people start to switch to other coins, Bitcoin's transactions will drop and so will the fees, thus the problem solves itself and people come back to it.

That's most likely the case. Seeing how the Antminer S9 has such high hashboard failure rates it's not really a surprise.

The only thing you can do in this case is accept it or contact Bitmain to RMA it. I'm not sure what Bitmain's policy for hashboard failures is though because I personally haven't had to RMA anything.
You should take into consideration the amount of time it will take to return it and get a new one as well if you decide to do that.

It would help if you could elaborate  what you mean by 'DDOS coin' besides letting us speculate based on the name of it.
How can we know if it's possible if we have absolutely no idea what you're talking about? Is it a coin that will be used to carry out DDoS attacks? If so, then hell no. That'd be illegal and the developers would go down pretty fast.

Of course they didn't. How do you expect them to refund over $80 million in Bitcoin that were stolen?
I don't think anyone's getting their money back.
The hack and fund recovery has nothing to do with the calculations and rates you're getting. The amount of money you get depends on the algorithm that Nicehash chooses to mine, that coin's price, Bitcoin's price and the network difficulty. Of course there will be (sometimes wild) fluctuations.

These Bitcoin are lost permanently. It is not (and shouldn't be) possible to access or recover Bitcoin from a wallet without knowing the private key & password.
There are many people who have lost access to their wallets for several reasons, and thus can no longer access the Bitcoins that they may have held in the past.
This is why everyone should take precautions such as backups and entrusting the private key to a trustworthy person.

Which wallet are you using?
It may be possible to re-broadcast the transaction with a higher fee so that it confirms. This feature is called replace-by-fee and as far as I'm aware Electrum and other modern wallets support it.
Otherwise you're out of luck. The transaction may stay on the mempool for a very long time until it is confirmed.

You could try to use an accelerator which will include your transaction in the next block that a pool mines, but due to extremely high network congestion they're probably unavailable.

GUIminer is a UI front-end for Bitcoin mining software. You can use it to mine on pools or solo but does not hold any accounts whatsoever.
You will have to find the pool that you used to mine Bitcoin on if that particular pool stored your mined Bitcoin there, or find the wallet that you sent the mined Bitcoin to automatically.

If GUIminer stored settings on a file, then you can probably use that file to find the pool you used to mine on assuming it still exists.

Mining is the process of spending computing power to process transactions, secure the network, and keep everyone in the system synchronized together. It can be perceived like the Bitcoin data center except that it has been designed to be fully decentralized with miners operating in all countries and no individual having control over the network. This process is referred to as "mining" as an analogy to gold mining because it is also a temporary mechanism used to issue new bitcoins. Unlike gold mining, however, Bitcoin mining provides a reward in exchange for useful services required to operate a secure payment network. Mining will still be required after the last bitcoin is issued.
source: https://bitcoin.org/en/faq#mining

Basically you get rewarded for securing the network using hardware.
I'd suggest that you read that entire page to learn everything you need to know about Bitcoin.


I hope you understand the fundamental difference between buying and mining now.

A South Korean bitcoin exchange is moving to declare bankruptcy following what it said was a debilitating hack and theft.

A message on Youbit's official website posted today states that, at around 4:34 a.m. local time, an external hack resulted in the loss of "about 17% of total assets."

The cyber attack is the second for Youbit, previously known Yapizon. The exchange was previously targeted in April in an attack which South Korean officials believe was conducted with the support of neighboring North Korea. Recent reports indicate that intelligence services in South Korea suspect that North Korea is behind additional attacks against domestic cryptocurrency exchanges, including market-leader Bithumb.

As a result of today's attack, Youbit said that it has halted deposits and withdrawals. According to Reuters, investigators have begun looking into the situation.

And while the company suggested that users may not see the full return of their funds, the statement indicated that Youbit would be disbursing the cryptocurrency it still has in its possession.

"Due to bankruptcy, the settlement of cash and coins will be carried out in accordance with all bankruptcy procedures," the exchange said in a translated statement. "However, in order to minimize the damage to our members, we will arrange for the withdrawal of approximately 75% of the balance at 4:00 am on December 19, The rest of the unpaid portion will be paid after the final settlement is completed."

The moves are being taken despite what Youbit characterized as a less severe intrusion compared to the one in April. The company also suggested that it would seek to pare losses by tapping insurance funds and selling a stake in the exchange.

"We will do our best to minimize the loss of our members by 17% , through various methods such as cyber comprehensive insurance (3 billion [won]) and selling the operating rights of the company," the company wrote.

source: https://www.coindesk.com/south-korean-bitcoin-exchange-declare-bankruptcy-hack/

NOT TO BE CONFUSED WITH YOBIT. Different exchange.

Unfortunately, you will have to use a fee that is in accordance with the current average fee or slightly higher if you want your transaction to be confirmed within a reasonable time frame.
This means that sending a 0.0001 BTC for a transaction right now means that the transaction will never confirm and will stay in the mempool until it is dropped.

You can use this website to determine what fees to use for your transactions: https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/

The first 50 BTC were generated from the genesis block (the first block in the Bitcoin blockchain) which does not reference previous blocks.
There is some fantastic technical information about the genesis block here: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Genesis_block
https://bitcoin.org/en/developer-guide#term-genesis-block

As with all other blocks, you can view details about it using a conventional block explorer: https://blockchain.info/block-index/14849

Nobody is trying to control Bitcoin, because it cannot be controlled.
They're trying to force all exchanges to follow the KYC guidelines, this isn't bad. Bitcoin IS involved in money laundering & drug trafficking. This is an attempt to reduce these crimes.
Nothing is happening to Bitcoin though.

Exchanges can move to whichever country they want, but they cannot operate in Europe unless they follow these European regulations. Thus, a European citizen would have to move out of Europe as well.

There are a few things that you need to make clear here.
First of all, what exactly do you want to do? Are you looking to buy Bitcoin and sell it at a higher price to make profit?
You say that you want to buy Bitcoin and then send it to an exchange. Why don't you buy it from the exchange directly instead and avoid the huge transaction fees?

You should carefully investigate the market before making any decisions because you might end up with a loss. I'd simply just buy Bitcoin and hold for the long-term.

It's important that I mention that a 750 ti isn't good (as in strong/efficient) in mining ANYTHING. It's a bad card for mining and you shouldn't mine anything on it if you want profitability or any decent amount of coins.
With that said, just enter on Google "cuda miner + (coin you want to mine)" and you'll most likely end up with a mining software made for Nvidia cards for that particular coin/algorithm and a guide on it.

You buy Antminers from here: http://bitmain.com/
And the DragonMint can be purchased from here: https://halongmining.com/shop/dragonmint-16t/

They are both out of stock so you should wait. They don't have any information about restocking but they haven't shipped the previous batch they sold yet so it will be a little while.
You could try to get some second-hand units through ebay or the marketplace section in this forum.
You should make sure that you have the electrical infrastructure to run them.