The EU has recently updated their AML regulation and now the lifetime ATM
withdrawal limit for unverified prepaid cards is 250 €. Therefore you would have to
order 8-12 cards in order to withdraw 2-3k €, which obviously is highly impractical or
even impossible (are there even that many Bitcoin debit card providers left?).

I agree that the BTC/USD market is less susceptible to such occurences. However, there is also
a precedent where a much more liquid trading pair (ETH/USD at Coinbase/GDAX) had a flash crash
(https://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/22/ethereum-price-crash-10-cents-gdax-exchange-after-multimillion-dollar-trade.html).
This is the reason why I argue that a cascade of margin calls in the BTC/USD market would be a real
bloodbath compared to the NEO flash crash, which had only negligible impact, because most
people don´t trade NEO/USD at all.

Besides, I think that the impact on the different exchanges would be incommensurable.
Exchanges like Bitfinex that offer margin trading and actually finance the margin positions
by P2P lending would be much more affected by a huge decline in the Bitcoin price than exchanges
like Bitstamp. An exchange that doesn´t offer margin trading at all can´t be jeopardized by
a cascade of margin calls.

I also look forward to seeing whether Tether is still around in a year!

The decision to make the CryptoRuble the only cryptocurrency that is
legal in Russia is incredibly shortsighted. If Bitcoin becomes a global settlement standard
and most other superpowers embrace it the Russians risk to be left behind with a
useless cryptocurrency. It would be smarter to embrace Bitcoin before China and the US
do it and regulate it in a comparable way to Belarus, who are working
towards becoming a hotspot for cryptocurrency.

On the other hand, the CryptoRuble could prove to be as effective as the Petro
in circumventing international sanctions. Nevertheless, it will be interesting
to see how these state-issued cryptocurrencies perform.

This is definitely a valid concern and likely to happen at most banks.
However, it is even more likely that they will simply disable your account, because you will
have too much activity (in terms of money transacted) on your account. Most
personal bank accounts are meant to allow you to pay your bills and
to receive a paycheck. Running an arbitrage business that involves a ton of high-value
transfers exceeds the thresholds for these personal accounts by a magnitude
and therefore most banks will shut you down and refer you to a business bank
account.

Unfortunately, these business bank accounts are hard to get (especially
if you are making crypto-related transactions, which you would be doing).

Another site that offers statistics for the Lightning Network
on mainnet is:
https://p2sh.info/dashboard/db/lightning-network?orgId=1

It currently displays the amount of open channels and the amount of Bitcoin
in use.

I understand that you are frustrated in your situation. However, very often
the people, who complain in forums like this leave out important pieces of information
that are critical for a good interpretation of the situation.

E.g. a user recently complained that Bitstamp shut down his account with a 5-digit
fiat balance and later it became evident that this guy was heavily involved
in dark net activities. At first I was wondering why Bitstamp would shut down a legit
account like this, but later it became obvious that they couldn´t possibly continue
to serve such users unless they want to be accessories for criminal activities.

I´m not implying that you are guilty of the same, but very often Bitstamp´s decisions
to close an account are actually justified.

What if I told you that it doesn´t need to scale? If its main
use case is being a store of value people will make maybe a single-digit
number of transactions per year. At these numbers the current
system works well enough.

Bitcoin´s true purpose is not facilitating online payments, credit cards
and e-wallets work just fine for that. Bitcoin´s true purpose is being
sound money with a supply that can´t be inflated. This would finally
allow people to store their earned wealth without having to worry
about confiscation or inflation.

I´d be extremely surprised if Tether would last another year.
They have issued more than 400M$ in the last week alone in order
to prop up the cryptocurrency markets.
Many people think that they are in a quandary, because they can´t let
the prices drop too much, because this would cause a cascade of margin calls
at Bitfinex, which would crash the price even further.

Just take a look at the NEO flash crash a few months ago. If a similar flash crash would
occur in the BTC/USD market it would be a complete bloodbath.

Just assume for a moment that Tethers are (partly) unbacked and the whole
operation is an elaborate fraud. I´m not saying that it really is one, just assume
that for a second. It is well known that these kind of operations often ramp up
their fraudulent activities near the end of their lifespan. A development like
this would pretty much look like what we are witnessing now, with daily
issuances of 100M$ of Tether or even more.

I´m tired of reading the "energy waste" argument over and over again.
The energy that is consumed by Bitcoin mining is the foundation of the security
of the network. This is why the Bitcoin blockchain is truly immutable, because
an attack on the network is simply too expensive due to the enormous energy
requirements of such an attack (alongside the hardware requirements that require
several datacenters full of ASICs).

Besides, electricity is wasted for so much stupid stuff and could be put
to better use in securing the world´s most secure settlement network.

I agree that Bitstamp is one of the best exchanges (alongside of Gemini). However, your last statement might be
a bit of a stretch. Bitstamp claimed to be licensed in Luxemburg for years but has recently scrapped the reference
from their homepage, which at least indicates that their license has not been granted yet.

Personally, I have used Bitstamp for several years and never had any problem and would really recommend them.
Especially, because they take security very seriously and the last time they were hacked no customer had to take
a haircut and since then they have increased their security measures even more, which might partly be responsible
for the issues that some of the people in this thread are facing.

Have you considered removing the restriction on only one account per person?
I understand the purpose of a rule like this with traditional gambling sites
that verify the identity of their customers or sites that offer P2P games like Poker where someone
with multiple accounts would obviously have an advantage.

But Crypto-Games doesn´t really fit into either of these categories.
Given the recent posts in this thread it seems that this rule creates unnecessary problems
and confusion among users and potential users.

I think Casares is able to grasp the potential of Bitcoin faster than most other people, because
of precisely these personal experiences in his childhood - arguably the developmental period
with the biggest impact on your personality.

Most people in the Western world never really had
these painful experiences of banking failures and hyperinflation (particularly, because the 2008 financial
crisis was never really solved and the central banks only kicked the can down the road, which will
eventually come back to haunt us all) and therefore do not appreciate the value
of a non-depreciating asset like Bitcoin.

Bitstamp and Gemini are the two most legit exchanges. Luckily for you both
of them also accept customers from the UK.

However, you have to be patient, because verification can take up to a few
weeks, because these exchanges are drowning in support requests and new
registrations. But if you are not in a hurry to sell your coins this shouldn´t really
be a problem.

I suggest you take some time and read the following article by the Co-founder of Blockstack:
https://medium.com/@muneeb/the-road-ahead-for-ethereum-b5b090bcd1a


People have been trying to find a solution for these problems for several decades without success.
What makes you think that the Ethereum team that is prone to postpone development milestones
will have more success than the bright minds, who researched this for decades?

Ethereum has maybe 1-2 years left and then it will eventually disappear due to the unsolvability
of these hard Computer Science problems.

France is a notorious high-tax country. These statements of Le Maire just sound like desperate attemps
to paint the current and upcoming taxation of cryptocurrencies as an inevitable outcome.

People should be free to do whatever they want with their money and losing more than half of it
to the state, who uses it to fund questionable endeavours (e.g. intervening in Libya, which has now
turned to a real shithole) is outright theft.

I hope that France one day will implement a more friendly taxation environment for
crytocurrencies like several other European countries like Austria or Germany have already done.

They are probably drowning in support requests.

You have to take into account that more than one hundred thousand debit cards were
shutdown after the WaveCrest news. Many people have probably made the switch to MisterTango,
because at the moment it is one of the few remaining options for a debit card that
can be loaded with BTC.

I think they will eventually give you a good reply if you are persistent.
Maybe you should post your questions in this thread, because active MisterTango users
might be able to help you out.

Someone should educate Putin about some of the characteristics of the Bitcoin network.
The claim that Bitcoin is not secured by anything is ridiculous. The BTC network is the most
secure settlement network in the world, because it is decentralized and secured by more
than 18000000 TH/s of computing power. It has 99.99 % up time for nearly a decade and is
used to conduct transactions with a value of several billion $ every day.

Bitcoin is a great store of value and has outperformed every single fiat currency in the last
decade.

Do you really think that he will keep the Bitcoins for the long-term?
I think it is much more likely that the Dallas Mavericks will be using a payment
solutions provider like BitPay that exchanges the Bitcoin to fiat for them.

Obviously keeping the Bitcoin would be the much smarter move (e.g. Roger
Ver made a ton of Bitcoin in the early days, because he never sold the Bitcoins
that he gained with his shops when Bitcoin were still worth nothing in terms of $).

http://omniexplorer.info/lookupadd.aspx?address=3MbYQMMmSkC3AgWkj9FMo5LsPTW1zBTwXL

Tether has issued 300M $ of USDT in the last 48 hours. This money
is used to prop up the cryptocurrency markets. I´d guess that without these
issuances the Bitcoin price would already trade much lower than 10000 $.
This was not genuine support at these levels, this was artificial liquidity
provided by Tether/Bitfinex.

Many people speculate that they were forced to inject more money, because an even
bigger plunge of the Bitcoin price would have caused a cascade of margin calls at Bitfinex.

I think this is caused by the fact that the ascent of the Internet has
destroyed many revenue streams that the media publishing companies used to have in the past.

All the advertising money goes to Google and Facebook and the remaining
companies (e.g. the big news sites) are fighting for the scraps.