I don´t necessarily disagree with this claim, but not everything that is heavily researched also produces the desired results.
The treatment of various lethal diseases is also heavily researched and still there are various diseases that can´t be cured
using current medicine. Maybe quantum computing will run into similar problems as the traditional computer architecture and
the situation won´t be much different in a few decades than it is now.

Besides, it is likely that even if quantum computers become a reality at some point in the future that cryptography will
have also improved.

Du weißt schon, dass es in Deutschland mittlerweile keinen einzigen Bitcoin ATM mehr gibt?
Also ist jede ATM Nutzung schon mit erheblichem Reiseaufwand verbunden.

Auch der Verkauf über Börsen in Kanada bringt dich nicht wirklich weiter, da auch eine derartige
Auszahlung letztendlich auf deinem Bankkonto eingehen würde.

This looks like another project where the founders mainly intend to enrich themselves.

Why are they already running a token sale when they have nothing to show apart from
a whitepaper, a Medium article and a small amount of code at Github?

A quote from the Medium article:

This doesn´t sound particularly decentralized to me.

Besides, I highly doubt that this is a good application of a decentralized system. Court systems
are handling huge amounts of highly sensitive information, not many people will be interested in providing
evidence to anonymous online jurors.

These guys should rather contribute to Bitcoin or one of the related projects (2nd-layer solutions, wallet
software...) instead of wasting time on a project like this that is never going to work. But then they probably
wouldn´t have the need to run a token sale...

I would agree with you if we were talking about Tesla (Tesla is borrowing a ton of money and is unprofitable).
However, Netflix is growing like crazy and is in a much better situation.

E.g. take a look at this article from last month:
https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/04/22/netflix-will-be-more-profitable-than-you-think.aspx




I know that they are in debt, but this is mainly due to the expensive streaming contracts and licenses.
This is a misleading situation in my opinion for the following reason:
Let´s say Netflix produces a movie like "The Irishman", which costs 140M $. The costs are paid upfront,
but the income due to the movie will show up much later when they actually air the movie.

Netflix current strategy of heavy expansion and expensive productions may be a bit aggressive and fueled
by a huge amount of debt, but it still seems to be working so far.

Irrespective of this, the amount of debt doesn´t even look that high compared to the market capitalization of Netflix.

Companies like Tesla are much more likely to go down due to huge amounts of debt.


edit:
Actually I think that you are right on second thought.

The root cause of all these companies that
are "debt-fueled" (Tesla, Netflix...) is probably the fact that the whole economy is distorted due to the availability
of unprecedented amounts of liquidity at low interest rates.

In an economic environment where central banks couldn´t introduce liquidity to this extent (e.g. in an
economy that is based on sound money like Bitcoin) situations like this wouldn´t be possible.

I agree with this post wholeheartedly. It is sad to see that many newcomers  only get into Bitcoin, because they hope
to realize some fiat gains. It would be much better for everyone if more people joined the Bitcoin community
that actually care about the project as an alternative to the current central banking system.

Maybe a prolonged bear market will shake out the people, who only looked for easy gains and will
ultimately lead to a healthier Bitcoin community.

Isn´t this just semantics? Of course you are right technically, but I don´t really see the downside
of keeping the current narrative even though it is not 100 % true. Mining is a process that is known to everyone
due to the mining of metals and other resources and therefore people can grasp this concept easily.
Besides, other terms that are used to describe the rewards for the miners are actually accurate (e.g. terms like
"block reward").

You missed the introduction of the new merit system
(an additional requirement in order to rise
to a higher rank).

You can find all relevant information in this thread:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2818350.0

I read the Wikipedia article and one quote made me laugh out loud:


I have a hard time believing this is true. I was a huge net depositor at a gambling company
back in the day and instead of closing my account due to large losses they instead showered
me with gifts and granted me a VIP manager. I think this is similar at most other sportbooks, too, because
large gamblers, who lose constantly are the best customers of any gambling company.

These companies only close accounts when the user himself wishes to self-exclude.

This is not true.

You are allowed to participate in an ICO even if you are based in the US.
However, an ICO is a form of a capital raise that falls under the supervision
of the SEC (Securities and Exchange commission). The problem is that most
ICOs are not registered with the SEC.

Obviously, it is easier for most projects to just exclude US investors, because this
frees them from the huge red tape and the enormous costs that are associated with
registering with the SEC.

I highly doubt that quantum computing will even become a problem during
our life time. The advances in terms of processing power of current computers
are already slowing down, because companies like Intel are already having problems
to keep up with Moore's law.

Besides, I read somewhere that a Bitcoin private key is so large that it would take more energy
than is produced by the sun in its lifetime to power a computer that would have
enough computing power to successfully crack it.

There are other threats that are a bigger concern to the security of Bitcoin than
quantum computing.

Take a look at the success of companies like Netflix. They are not charging you a micropayment for every
minute of content that you consume, but rather charge a flat monthly fee.

I highly doubt that Netflix would be more successful if they would abandon their current business model.
Micropayments are a viable solution for many other problems, but the subscription model has
several advantages when it comes to stuff that is consumed in large amounts - not only from
the merchant perspective, but also from the consumer perspective.

Sent.

Thank you!

.

This is extremely unlikely in my opinion.

Take a look at this quote from the article / opening post:

There is no way they are going to release him if he caused a financial damage to
Russian citizens that is as high as 750 million rubles. It is highly likely that he will be
put to jail for more than a decade.

I also suspect that BitMEX is one of the exchanges where manipulation is rampant.
If you haven´t seen this Medium article, you should definitely take a look at it:
https://medium.com/@mattcollburner/bitmex-insiders-caught-in-a-web-of-lies-6d9b90baa693

Of course this could be FUD, but it seems very shady to me if a subsidiary of BitMEX is
trading on the same platform that the retail customers use (this opens up all
kind of possible scams like frontrunning, hunting stops and so on).

I wouldn´t worry about the TOR software, I´d rather worry about the rumors
that certain intelligence agencies (e.g. the NSA) are owning a non-negligible
percentage of the TOR exit nodes. If this is indeed true, your anonymity can be
compromised if you are unlucky.

Obviously TOR is still more anonymous than a regular internet connection.

Tell that to the Indian government  

https://cryptonews.com/news/indian-government-may-retroactively-tax-crypto-1851.htm


Regarding the actual topic of this thread it is obvious that they are not going to reimburse customers
from these countries. Besides, I highly doubt that they actively encouraged players from these countries
to use a VPN. They may have not really cared about the possibility to use a VPN, but active encouragement
by the operators seems extremely unlikely.

I think this problem is partly caused by the combination of wealth and democracy as a
form of government. Democracy works great in the first generation where everyone still
remembers the horrors of the tyranny or the dictatorship that preceded the democracy.

However, in the first world we are already past that stage where nearly all people, who still experienced
these horrors are either dead or too old. The other problem is related to the fact that the easiest
way to get people to like you and to actually vote for you, is to promise them free stuff and
government handouts. This leads to a bidding war between candidates where you can only win an election
if you promise to increase government spending / welfare. This leads to an expansion of the welfare
state, which in turn leads to an increasingly large number of people that live off the government.
After the percentage of these people gets too big in a society, the society is basically fucked.
E.g. in my rather rich European country only 14 % of the people are net taxpayers
(the other 86 % of the population either pay no taxes at all (children, unemployed...) or pay
less in taxes than they receive in other government transfers). This is obviously a huge problem
for the society and my society is not the only society that is experiencing this bad development.

Despite this unsustainable decline of society the system still hasn´t exploded, because of the reason
that I shortly touched upon at the start - the enormous wealth that has been built up
in the previous generations and the general technological progress.

Nonetheless, I completely agree with your post that these countries will experience very bad times
in the future.

If you think this is bad, you should take a look at the Currency Exchange subforum.
Obvious scammers have been using self-locked threads (they lock their own threads after every bump)
for months in attempts to scam unsuspecting newbies.

The problem is known to the administration and yet these users are still allowed to post,
because this apparently is also covered by "free speech" and scams are not
moderated all over Bitcointalk.

In my opinion this is even worse than the conspiracy theories posted by various guys here, because of
the financial damage that it causes.



Do US dollars have a hard cap? No.
Do US dollars have a predictable issuance schedule? No.
Do Chuck E Cheese tokens have a hard cap? No.
Do Chuck E Cheese tokens have a predictable issuance schedule? No.

Do Bitcoins have a hard cap? Yes.
Do Bitcoins have a predictable issuance schedule? Yes.

Therefore it is either stupid or disingenuous to lump Bitcoins in with these obvious
scam projects like US dollars or Chuck E Cheese tokens.

Electricity is not the only cost in mining a Bitcoin. If it were that easy everyone would
just mine their own BTC.

You forgot that the difficulty of mining BTC increases all the time. E.g. years ago you
could successfully mine a block using your own CPU. These days you won´t mine a single block
if you don´t have a data center full of the newest ASICs.

Even if you have a data center full of ASICs (that also cost money) you will run them 24/7 and
not mine a block for days, because the mining market is so competitive.

In a year the average cost of mining a single Bitcoin will probably be 8000 $ or more, because
of the rising difficulty.