You really think that they would give any cryptocurrency the status of "legal tender"?
I don´t think they will do that, because that would increase the legitimacy of cryptocurrencies
extremely.

I know that certain Swiss municipalities allow the paying of taxes with Bitcoin, but even there
it is only a test run and limited to an amount like roughly 200 €. You can imagine that the IRS
will never accept it if even progressive Swiss municipalities don´t allow it for non-negligible amounts.

I think you tend to forget the influence that the circulating supply
has on the price of the underlying cryptocurrency.

E.g. Bitcoin has roughly 16.7 million coins outstanding and of this amount probably
more than 5 million BTC are lost indefinitely. On the other hand Ethereum
has roughly 96 million ETH outstanding, which is a multiple of the BTC
supply.

This fact alone makes it incredibly hard to overcome the BTC price.
Besides, Ethereum has a lot of competitors for its main use case (smart contracts)
in NEO, Cardano, ICON and so on while Bitcoin has not a single
competitor for its main use case of being a store of value.

ETH price will never exceed the BTC price.

This is literally nothing to worry about.

Electricity is wasted for stuff like trashy TV shows, the production
of consumer goods that aren´t really needed and so much other useless stuff. By contrast Bitcoin
is the world´s most secure settlement network. Why is it a problem when this network consumes
large amounts of energy? The world needs sound money and electricity usage is one of
the most unconvincing arguments against Bitcoin, because it is the very foundation
of the consensus algorithm that secures it all.

It´s called proof-of-work for a reason.

Why do you think Bitcoin is so popular in the Ukraine - a country that is
quite notorious for the amount of government corruption up to the highest levels?

Recently the Ukrainian politicians had to disclose their Bitcoin holdings and some
of them had pretty large BTC stashes. I´d argue that many of them see the value
of Bitcoin in the fact that it can´t be confiscated even if they are found guilty of corruption.

I´d argue that Bitcoin has a real use case especially in countries that are beset
with corruption.

The question was not directed to me, but I´ll give it a try. I admit that the following banks
are not active worldwide, but they are also not operating in a tiny 3rd world country and instead
are the 4 biggest banks in Australia:

-National Australia Bank
-ANZ
-the Commonwealth Bank of Australia
-Westpac Banking Corporation


https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-12-30/australian-banks-reportedly-freeze-accounts-bitcoin-users

I´m still waiting for a clarification of the mentioned banks in a new article, but this
is still a pretty shocking development for Australian Bitcoin users if the 4 biggest
banks in their country close accounts that deal with cryptocurrency.

I´m not based in Australia myself, but I also had problems with my bank that simply
refuses to process wires that originate from Bitcoin exchanges.

They work, because they offer a prepaid MasterCard and not a prepaid VISA
and therefore are completely unaffected by the decision to suspend all
cards issued by WaveCrest.

However, as you have already posted in the other thread, the fees are
too steep for Bitcoin deposits at the moment (possibly partly caused
by the congestion of the Bitcoin network?).

Have you taken a look at the FunFair showcase?
https://showcase.funfair.io/

The products look horrible and worse than 99 % of existing online casinos. Nearly
every cryptocurrency casino looks better, too. A side like BetKing is miles ahead
of FunFair if you ask me.

This site will never revolutionize online gambling, it is at best in an early development stage
and at worst a questionable ICO that will never deliver.

Regarding the addition of all these ERC20 tokens to BetKing:
I doubt that most of these will see much volume. People don´t really hold
them except for speculative purposes. I hope that I´m wrong, but I don´t really
see much betting action for these tokens. The BKB token is different, because
the existing client base obviously has a lot of them, but for the rest I´m sceptical.

I agree, that is one of the downsides that I talked about. By the way, the fee
for Bitcoin deposits used to be "1 % with no less than 0.005 BTC". They have already halved it after user
complaints, maybe they will slash it even further if enough users complain about the
fees.

The other downside is that ATM withdrawals (except the 1 withdrawal up to 200 € that
is free every month) cost 2 % with a minimum fee of 3 €. That is on top of eventual charges
by the ATM operator that can be another 1-3 % depending on the country where you use
the card.

You could use Bitstamp. They currently cover the complete transaction fee for Bitcoin withdrawals:
https://www.bitstamp.net/fee_schedule/

This works even with really miniscule amounts, because they batch their withdrawals. However,
you should keep in mind that it doesn´t really make sense to send a few
cents worth of BTC, because one day you probably want
to transfer the small amount out of your personal wallet again and this could prove to be very
difficult with the current fees. As of now many "dust balances" are completely unspendable and
will never be if fees continue to stay at the current level or rise even more in the future.

Because Russia has a ton of natural resources (oil, gas...). They could simply demand
payment for access to their gas pipelines in CryptoRuble and by doing this circumvent
existing sanctions. Right now they have a hard time doing business, because the international
financial system is heavily subject to the whims of the USA. A cryptocurrency like
the CryptoRuble would be completely independent of US sanctions, because they can´t really shut
down a cryptocurrency - provided the Russians create it with a redundant or maybe even a decentralized
structure.

I´d guess that Venezuela will probably be the first country that issues a cryptocurrency
in order to circumvent international sanctions.

Do you have a source for this claim?

I acknowledge that women are increasingly
interested in computer gaming, but I have my doubts that they already
make up almost half of the gaming population. I think men still make up
the large majority of consumers, who are into gaming.

There are several reasons in my opinion - though I admit that some of them are pure conjecture on my part:

1. Wrong priorities
Some exchanges that are responsible for a large part of daily Bitcoin transaction volume have been
busy adding altcoins instead of deploying SegWit. This is partly understandable, because every additional
trading pair of course increases their revenue. On the other hand they would also save huge amounts
of money due to the 20-40 % that they would save on Bitcoin transaction fees when consolidating deposits
or processing user withdrawals.

2. Political motives
Some exchanges don´t support the scaling roadmap of Bitcoin and instead want to see a Bitcoin fork succeed
that uses a different solution for scaling. Therefore it is obviously in their interest to stall SegWit adoption as much as possible
in order to sabotage the effort. This seems to be partly successful, because many people are wondering why
SegWit hasn´t really had an effect on the mempool and on the transaction fees.

3. Incompatible business model
Some services like BitPay have a business model that won´t really work if Bitcoin becomes a
settlement layer for high-value payments. They need fast and cheap transactions, because otherwise
no one would use their service to pay for goods. This is why they added support for different altcoins
instead of deploying SegWit, because even a 20-40 % decrease in transaction fees due to SegWit
wouldn´t really save their current business model.

There are many other reasons, but this should be enough for now.

The answer depends on the type of SegWit address that you are using.

Are you using a native SegWit address (a bech32 address that starts with the letters "bc")? Then you can send funds to non-SegWit addresses,
but most wallets can´t send to you, unless the sender also uses a wallet that has already implemented bech32 support.

If you are using an encapsulated SegWit address (an address that starts with the number "3") then you can also send funds to
non-SegWit addresses. Additionally, these addresses are completely backward compatible that means that you can successfully receive
funds from every wallet or exchange.

How did you calculate this?

If you calculate this task with the assumption that a block is propagated successfully every 10 minutes
you would only clear roughly 6-8k transactions (a block usually contains 1500-3000 transactions). Therefore
I have no idea why you think 30 minutes would be enough to clear 185000 transactions.

We even often have periods where no blocks at all are found for 30 minutes. Theoretically it is possible,
but I don´t think that there ever was a timeframe where more than 70 blocks were found within
30 minutes, which would roughly be the amount of blocks that you would need to clear 185000 transactions
if you assume that during this 30 minutes no additional transactions are broadcasted.

Exactly my thoughts!
They are already trying to take advantage of the current situation:
https://twitter.com/monaco_card/status/949294877979766784

If anyone needs a working alternative:
https://mistertango.com/en/mastercard/

Their Mastercard is issued by Wirecard and not by WaveCrest and therefore is unaffected by VISA´s decision.
The provider is pretty reliable and only has 1-2 little downsides in my opinion. If you want to know
more about them there are already a few threads about Mistertango at Bitcointalk and they even have
their own representative on this board.

I imagine that this will be really difficult for them. Nearly all Bitcoin debit card providers used
cards issued by WaveCrest for a reason. There are just not that many card issuers that have a
valid license from VISA in the first place that want to deal with crytocurrency-related companies.

Bitwala may be fine, because they offer various other services, but the other Bitcoin debit
card providers can basically close down if they don´t manage to find another card issuer.

Let´s see what Bitwala comes up with after they calm down after the shock today.

Major bitcoin debit card providers such as Wirex, TenX and Bitwala have issued
statements informing users that all VISA card operations have been cancelled effective
immediately following urgent communication from card issuer WaveCrest.

With zero notice, this leaves thousands of debit card users around the world trapped with no access to funds.

...

https://cryptoinsider.21mil.com/bitcoin-debit-cards-suspend-services-following-urgent-users-left-trapped-without-funds/

...

For some reason VISA has terminated all the Bitcoin debit cards that were issued
by WaveCrest. Originally they had banned people from outside Europe in September,
but apparently this was only the beginning of their crackdown.

Let´s hope that Bitwala, TenX & the rest of them manage to come up
with another solution to continue to offer Bitcoin debit cards.

Has it already been specified what is necessary to run your own Lightning Network node?
I guess that you would need one of the Lightning Network clients alongside with enough
locked Bitcoin to provide liquidity. Besides, it is probably necessary to be connected to the internet
in order to route transactions.

Which other requirements do I miss?

The mempool contains more than 180000 transactions at the moment:
https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions

Therefore the BTC network might not process transactions as fast as during
periods with less congestion. Maybe HitBTC has attached a too low fee and therefore
your transaction hasn´t confirmed yet? It is also possible that they batch transactions
in order to save fees and your withdrawal got broadcasted to the network at a later date than you think.

I agree that we probably won´t see lower fees even if SegWit adoption increases
substantially. In a way this isn´t even a bad development, because the block reward
is going to become less and less relevant for the miners over time, which increases the importance
of the creation of a competitive fee market.

I would guess that transaction fees will be +50$ per transaction after the next block reward halving
in 2020. Small transactions will hopefully happen on 2nd layer solutions like the Lightning Network by then.