If I understand the situation correctly Vinnik wasn´t even involved in the MtGox hack.
However, he was the mastermind behind BTC-E, which was used to launder the coins
obtained in the hack.

Many experts believe that they really did this in a clever way and that even many coins
on legit exchanges like Kraken or Bitstamp are actually coming from the Gox hack. Tracking tools
for analyzing the blockchain weren´t as sophisticated back in the day as they are today and this
makes the analysis even more difficult.

I suspect that there is a floor around the current average
cost of mining a single Bitcoin. Sure, the price might drop below
the average cost of mining a BTC for a while and some miners
may have to close their operations, but long-term the miners
(and other parties) are heavily incentivized to keep the price
above these levels.

The actual amount of BTC that is traded on the exchanges is still negligible and
not much capital inflows are needed to prop up the price.

We won´t see levels below 6k or even below 7k per BTC for a prolonged period
of time.

Could be a blood bath.

Or it could be the prelude to a huge pump fueled by 250M $ of new Tether:

I actually considered opening a short position, but then 250M $ of USDT were issued
by Tether. This made me hesitant, because we all know that Tether has driven the price
action many times. Otherwise I completely agree that this is actually a good short opportunity,
because there is just no hype at the moment and the Consensus rally never materialized.

Besides, the trading volume at the major exchanges has also been rather low in the last
few days.

Das stimmt so nicht.
Bitcoins, die kürzer als ein Jahr gehalten wurden, werden mit dem persönlichen Einkommensteuersatz versteuert und
eben nicht mit der Kapitalertragsteuer belegt.

Es gibt einen derartigen Service von Bitcointalk User LoyceV (ich würde ihn als vertrauenswürdig einschätzen, aber das
musst du letztendlich natürlich selbst beurteilen).

Außerdem bietet er seinen Service bisher nur für Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Gold und BitCore an,
da selbst ihm die anderen Exchanges wie gate.io, die auch andere BTC Forks handeln, zu unseriös sind.

Re: LoyceV's Bitcoin Fork claiming guide (and service)

The Coinpayments Signature Campaign has ended:

Re: [CLOSED] | 🔥 Coinpayments.net Signature Campaign 🔥 | 100% SegWit |

This is just marketing. No one, who actually values his privacy will buy a mainstream smartphone from
one of the biggest manufacturers in the world that is running Android.

Besides, they should really fire the guy, who came up with the name "Exodus".
The name "Exodus" is already in use in the cryptocurrency scene
(it is the name of a multi-currency wallet that has integrated Shapeshift).

https://www.exodus.io/

I understand why this might look bizarre to you.

However, I suspect that this is caused by the fact that the usual
deposit methods for ROW players that are used to fund gambling
accounts (e.g. credit cards, prepaid vouchers like Paysafecard,
e-wallets like Skrill or Neteller) can´t be used by US residents
for gambling transactions.

Neteller and the various other companies in this space withdrew from
the US market (at least for gambling-related transactions) years ago
due to a change in the legal landscape.

This might change in the future as the Supreme Court has struck down a law
that prevented legal sportsbetting in the US a few days ago:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/14/us/politics/supreme-court-sports-betting-new-jersey.html


The sportsbooks that you refer to therefore are not accepting Bitcoin, because they like
the technology, but rather because this is the only possible way for Americans to fund their
accounts.

The analysis of Alex de Vries contains huge methodological problems.

#1:

Does this look like reliable data to work with? I wouldn´t take estimations that
are based on "shaky eyewitness accounts" seriously at all. These eyewitnesses might
be completely biased, which would obviously distort the results of the whole
study (e.g. if you talk to a disgruntled ex-Bitmain employee he might not be 100 % honest,
because he might still have a grudge against his former employer).

#2:

While this seems theoretically possible, it is strongly likely that the hashrate is indeed
a pretty good indicator of the electricity consumed in Bitcoin mining.

There are several other flaws in his method (e.g. he bases some of his calculations on the
lifetime energy requirement of an Antminer S9 while completely ignoring the possibility
that more efficient ASICs emerge).

Besides, he completely ignores the fact that some energy usage might come from sources
like the geothermal renewables in Iceland or that the energy providers are actually happy
that miners are making use of excess energy in the system.

If anyone wants access to the full article, send me a PM (not sure if I´m allowed
to link it here, because it was published behind a paywall of a journal).

Interesting post!

However, we really have no idea how Bitcoin will react to a serious financial crisis in the real world.
It was founded after the financial crisis of 2008 and therefore has not been around during a real
recession.

Many people believe that the next financial crisis will be much worse than the last one, because the problems of the financial
crisis of 2008 were never really solved and central banks around the world intervened to an unimaginable extent.

Bitcoin will never replace credit cards if you ask me.

I think Bitcoin´s main value proposition is the fact that it can be a store of value due to
its unique characteristics that make it a form of sound money (hard cap on the total
amount of BTC, predictable issuance schedule, scarcity...).

Credit cards will always be more efficient in terms of transaction volume per second, because Bitcoin is designed in a way
that requires a trade-off between efficiency and decentralization/security.

2nd-layer solutions might change that in the future, however they will run into the same issue
when they are designed in a way that leads to a decentralized system.

How did you arrive at this conclusion?

You can find the following link at the Asianconnect88 website, which leads
to the License Validation site of Curacao:

https://validator.curacao-egaming.com/validate?domain=www.asianconnect88.com&seal_id=4a99a210ee4c14be17953adf385f7af3b237657b19d9b674aa73af414ebf3ac49d9ad04cea30a7ef550cff7919b223be&stamp=e972dfe781b6bb75c070e22cf1b8e45b

According to this, they have a valid gambling license in exactly the jurisdiction
that they claim.

I´d like to direct you to this thread where I outlined a few reasons why the
waste of energy argument against Bitcoin is stupid:

Debunking the waste of energy argument against Bitcoin

Other users added their own arguments as well and the whole thread is definitely worth a read!

From the article that you linked:

If this is indicative of the quality of the data that de Vries used for his analysis
his calculations are completely useless and not to be trusted. Besides, he erroneously believes
that large amounts of desktop computers are still used for Bitcoin mining when in reality
it is 100 % ASICs as of today, because ASICs are simply too much ahead in terms of computing
power for this specific task (all botnets that mine cryptocurrencies on the affected computers
mine other coins (e.g. Monero) and not Bitcoin where ASICs are ubiquitous).

Charlie Lee sold pretty much at the top near the Litecoin ATH. This makes you wonder, whether
he knew something that the average investor didn´t know. It just looks pretty suspicious if you manage
to sell an asset that you own for several years right at the peak.

Besides, his former involvement at Coinbase and the subsequent listing of Litecoin
at Coinbase should be regarded somewhat sceptically. Would LTC have ever been added
to Coinbase if Charlie Lee didn´t work there? There is a decent possibility that he and
several other insiders that knew in advance that LTC was going to be listed at Coinbase made
a killing due to this insider information.

I recently stumbled across this article that details how big the influence of the Federal Reserve
is on the supposedly "independent" economics profession:
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/07/priceless-how-the-federal_n_278805.html

(I know that the Huffington Post is not the best of sources, but the article is actually quite good)

The existence of central banking is a great tool for the elites and of course Bitcoin
is a threat to this model. In a way politicians are also beneficiaries of the central
banking system, because it allows them to overspend their national budgets by historically
unprecedented amounts.

Let´s assume that your theory is correct for a second. What exactly is the argument why silver will have higher gains than Gold
in this scenario? The industrial usage?

Where exactly is the counterparty risk in Bitcoin? Of course theoretically the big miners could collude to blacklist
your coins or try to double-spend, but in reality the incentive structure of the system disincentivizes fraudulent behavior.
If a miner would actually perform a fraudulent act like that the whole trust in Bitcoin would be gone and they would
be sitting on hardware and other infrastructure that is now worthless instead of making a fortune by continuing to play by
the network´s rules (and they obviously would have to write off hundreds of million of $ in investment).

This is one of the ingenious elements in Bitcoin´s design. The incentive structure ensures that
the only powers that could theoretically cheat the system stay honest.

The only counterparty risk I see is if you store your coins with an exchange or some other kind of service. But
everyone here heavily dissuades newcomers from doing this with the common slogans like "Not your private keys,
not your coins" and similar stuff. Of course some people choose to ignore this advice, but they get
Bitfinex´ed or Gox´ed sooner or later.

If the post in the German betting forum that I linked above is true, then they do
require KYC even if you only deposit using Bitcoin.

I´m not sure why SyGambler didn´t have to verify himself, while the guy from the German
betting forum had to do it. Apparently both did deposit using Bitcoin and therefore it is odd
that they had completely opposite experiences with Asianconnect.

Is the minimum deposit when depositing with Bitcoin really as low as 10 € with Asianconnect? Or is this
only for subsequent deposits after you have made a larger first deposit?

I also don´t think that r0ach is a member of Mensa, but I still think that his IQ would probably be sufficient for
a membership.

His focus on topics related to Jews/Judaism and similar stuff is of course over the top, but his
analysis of certain aspects of the economic system is actually pretty spot-on. He certainly
has a talent for identifying various scams in the economy (e.g. some of his comments with
regard to the real estate scam, the nature of fractional-reserve banking or some of the shenanigans
in the stock market).

What he doesn´t understand is that metals (especially silver) are subject to a supply response.
If the silver price would increase substantially, miners around the world would simply ramp up their
operations, which would cause the price to revert to previous levels.

Bitcoin doesn´t have a supply response. Even if the miners would ramp up their operations after a price increase
and the total hashrate would double or triple in the next year we still wouldn´t see the mining of a single additional Bitcoin
apart from the already expected number of Bitcoins.

It is not too late to sell your silver stash for a stash of Bitcoins.

Of course everyone is free to start their own cryptocurrency (and even allowed to use code from
open source projects like Bitcoin  ).

However, you also have to see the downside of the emergence of +1000 different altcoins. Newcomers
are easily led astray by the huge amount of altcoins and the buzzwords that the people behind
these projects use to shill their respective coins. Some newcomers to the cryptocurrency scene may
immediately recognize the unique characteristics of Bitcoin, but many others will jump into
coins that look cheap or are at least well advertised.

How many new Coinbase users did buy into coins like Litecoin (I agree with
the previous post where someone called it a "testnet for Bitcoin) or ETH due to a
lack of knowledge?

Many newcomers gravitate to these projects and become disheartened after losing
their money in various scams, shitcoins or even simply by trading random altcoins and losing
slowly to fees (if they are not victim to market manipulation that is ubiquitous in small cap altcoins).

If you would have entered the cryptocurrency scene in 2012 you would basically be buying BTC and be finished with
your investment and ideally you would also start to expand your knowledge about Bitcoin.
If you enter the cryptocurrency scene in 2017 or 2018 you are bombarded by sleazy marketing
of various altcoins, outright scams, ICOs and various other stuff that is designed to separate you from
your money (or worse, from your Bitcoins!).

I´m not arguing that it is bad to launch a new cryptocurrency, I´m arguing that after thousands of new
projects Bitcoin is still the number #1 and will always be the number #1 for the reasons that I outlined above
(and for the reasons that Torque has added).