You are missing a possibility - accept BTC payments using a service like Bitpay or Coinpayments that covers the exchange rate risk for you.
If you integrate BTC or another cryptocurrency using a provider like this, you definitely don´t have to worry anymore
about a highly volatile exchange rate.

The solutions to the problem mentioned by you have been working flawlessly for years.

This conclusion is kind of problematic. Bitcoin has outperformed every other currency and every other asset class
on this planet as well. Therefore you can´t really argue that the dollar is losing credibility, because compared to
Bitcoin everything has lost credibility.

However, you are probably right that the dollar has lost credibility.

Take a look at the development of the purchasing power of the $ over the last decades:

I think this is pure conjecture. I couldn´t find any claim that the CME group actually has any plans to offer any products related to altcoins at all.

Why would they even do that? The liquidity of the majority of altcoins (with the exception of maybe ETH) is way too low to be suitable
for any sort of derivatives. Additionally, it is very doubtful whether it would be even legal for them to offer any products related to this due
to the regulatory uncertainty surrounding most of these cryptocurrencies.

There are probably several reasons for this.

Off the top of my head:
-women entering higher education and (later) the workforce in higher numbers, which obviously enhances the pool of potential employees for companies
-the slow decline of several labor-intensive industries (e.g. coal mining) industries
-automation, which enables companies to achieve the same output with fewer human workers
-downward pressure due to actual outsourcing of jobs to low-cost countries in Asia (I´d argue that even the threat of it keeps wages down)
-less powerful unions compared to a few decades ago in most countries
...

The Bitcoin Cash price rise that you are talking about was the result of heavy market manipulation.

More than 40 % of the volume of BCH occured at Bithumb, a Korean Bitcoin exchange, that offers the possibility
to trade with zero fees (or buy vouchers that enable you to do this). This enables rampant wash-trading, which makes
it really easy to manipulate the prices. These manipulations distort the prices at other exchanges as well, because every
price discrepancy between exchanges obviously creates arbitrage opportunities.

If you don´t believe me, look into my post history where I showed a screenshot of the Bithumb user interface where
you can see the option to buy zero trading fee vouchers.

And why exactly does Bitcoin need these start-ups?
Bitcoin has been around longer than every single one of them and worked just
fine without them.

What is happening here, is actually pretty simple. Businesses like Bitpay are generating enormous returns and
therefore the investors and the people in charge have a huge incentive to do everything in their power
to prevent Bitcoin from developing in a direction that is diametrically opposed to their business plans.
Bitcoin as a settlement layer with high fees doesn´t really work well for a start-up like Bitpay that is
dependent on affordable fees and fast confirmations.

I´m not really sure if Calvin Ayre is a beneficial thing for Bitcoin. He has been a vocal supporter of Bitcoin Cash and
is involved in one of the few big gambling sites that actually accept BCH deposits.

Here are some articles that summarize his claims regarding Bitcoin Cash:
https://news.bitcoin.com/calvin-ayre-declares-bitcoin-cash-the-only-bitcoin/
http://www.newsbtc.com/2017/10/19/calvin-ayre-bitcoin-cash-closely-resembles-bitcoin-sparked-entire-digital-currency-boom/

0cd4649fb341fd980eda31e9962bab4225a78c44b8ce9564e7d270672e1052f6

Could you accelerate this transaction? Thank you for your help  

edit: the transaction has more than 30 confirmations now, I don´t need your help anymore

Why would you want to do that?
Why would you spend your precious BTC, which accelerate in value over time as supply decreases when you could alternatively
spend your local fiat currency that does the opposite?

It really doesn´t make sense to spend sound money if you could also pay using fiat currency.

Look at the guys who paid 10000 BTC for a pizza back in the day. They could have been set for life
if they simply paid for pizza using fiat currency and instead would have held their BTC stash.

There are many reasons why Bitfinex is a good exchange for trading, but this is not one of them. They have been dropped
by their banks, they are heavily involved in Tether (an entity that is viewed with much scepticism by many people in the
cryptocurrency world) and they got rid of their obligations to BFX token holders in a very opaque way. They didn´t outright
scam anyone as far as I know, but some things about Bitfinex are definitely suspicious.

On the other hand, they are the biggest exchange by volume and their trading engine works pretty well - even in times
of high volatility. This is obviously preferable to exchanges like Kraken that stop working as soon as trading volume picks
up due to high market activity.

Interesting chart, Torque!

However, I don´t really know what to say about these stats. The US economy is obviously heavily reliant on consumption and most people happily
oblige by wasting their entire paycheck on consumption. A big part of the population goes even further by going into debt for the purchase
of consumer goods.

Nonetheless, the chart implies a falling velocity of money, which in my opinion would indicate that people have shifted their preferences from
pure consumption to saving money for the future (lower time preference). It gets really interesting when you look at the saving rate development in the
same time frame from the same source:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PSAVERT

As you can see the savings rate hasn´t really increased and most people are still busy with pure consumption. However, as the chart posted by you shows the
velocity of money has been on a constant decline, which is rather contradictory.

I´m pretty sure that the expected value of investing in Bitcoin directly is higher than lending money on Bitfinex - even at the current BTC price level.
This is assuming that you can endure a short-term drawdown if it would occur, which obviously can´t happen if you decide to lend the funds at BFX.

Investing in BTC directly would also save you the hassle and the costs of setting up a US LLC.

Another argument in favor of buying BTC directly is that you can take advantage of upcoming forks, which basically
is like receiving a dividend payment everytime it happens (of course you have to make sure that you don´t do anything
wrong or fall for a scam wallet while splitting your coins).

This isn´t as exciting as you claim it to be. Open up a 5-year chart of the EUR/USD trading pair.
You will see that in 2013-2014 the exchange rate was roughly 1.35 for quite a long time.

The Euro is just gaining back a bit of the ground that he lost compared to the Dollar since 2014.
However, both of these currencies are subject to a high inflation, which makes assets
like Bitcoin even more attractive.

I think you are underestimating the difficulty of moving to Hong Kong. If you are a wealthy individual in China the Capital Controls in place ensure
that you can´t easily move your wealth out of the country. Macau is basically next to Hong Kong and the only way to move non-negligible amounts
of money from mainland China to Macau is by using a service like a "junket operator" (basically a subset of organized crime that enables money transfers
for wealthy gamblers and in return gets commissions from the Macau casinos).

Therefore you can imagine that it is exponentially more difficult to move wealth from mainland China to Hong Kong, because unlike Macau
Hong Kong doesn´t really have the pretext of gambling and entertainment and instead is a well-known financial hotspot.

I haven´t even mentioned the other difficult aspects of simply leaving the country like abandoning your family or losing your job (assuming
you had one in China in the first place). The Capital Controls are only one of many problems that make your whole proposition
a rather tough endeavour.

Investment profit has gone through the roof due to this bet by Cuelino478:
https://www.crypto-games.net/bet/dice/1787707650


I remember that he made a similar bet a few days ago, which he won. Unfortunately, this time even a 97.254 % chance
of winning wasn´t high enough. This bet looks even more crazy at the current BTC price than it would have looked 1-2 years ago.

It is good that you are open to using an escrow. However, I think that the main problem of your
offer is something different:


You require that a potential buyer sends you proof of ID. This is obviously understandable, because
you want to protect yourself against people with nefarious intentions. Nonetheless, your account
has been registered today and you have no reputation in this forum at all. People obviously are
highly hesitant to send a scan or a picture of their ID to someone unknown, because they would open
themselves up to all the shenanigans that can be done using the ID of someone else (identity theft).

If you want to trade using SEPA I would simply suggest signing up for one of the exchanges
with SEPA bank transfers like Kraken or Bitstamp (my recommendation).

You can imagine that many people still haven´t claimed their BCH from pre-fork BTCs.

There are many possible reasons for this:
-some people might not even know of the fork, because they don´t really follow news related to BTC
-some people lack the necessary technical knowledge to safely split their coins
-some people are paranoid and don´t want to take the risk of splitting their coins
-some coins might be locked due to NLockTime (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/NLockTime)
-some people might have lost access to their coins due to losing their private keys, lack of back-ups or simply dying

Besides, there is a huge amount of BTC on exchanges like Coinbase that haven´t distributed the BCHs to their users
as of now. If Coinbase is indeed going to credit the BCH balances on the 1st of January, you can expect a huge surge in
BCH supply.

Have you read the header message at Fairlay?


Due to the size of the mempool (currently roughly 110k transactions, yesterday it even peaked at roughly 170k) transactions
are either taking a long time or are very expensive in terms of transactions fees. Therefore Fairlay temporarily
decided to halt all withdrawals. The situation should improve in the next 24-48 hours, because the average time
between broadcasted bitcoin blocks has stabilized. 

I concede that a random user on Twitter may not be the most accurate source.

Regarding the bolded claim:
Friedman LLP explicitly states in the audit that they didn´t even review the terms of the banking relationships at all!


Have you read the actual audit? They didn´t review banking statements that go back years or even months. They just took a look
at the balances as of 15th September, 2017.

If anyone wants to take a further look:
https://tether.to/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Final-Tether-Consulting-Report-9-15-17_Redacted.pdf

And full of opportunities!

Depending on your ethics you can get really rich, really fast simply by setting up
a profesionally looking ICO. Even if you have moral constraints that prevent you from doing this
the whole crypto space currently resembles a "gold rush era". There are many early adopters, who bought
BTC or ETH when they were ridiculously cheap.

However, I concede that the unregulated nature of the current cryptocurrency scene begets an
unprecented amount of outright scams, vaporware or simply untested and unused technologies.
If you doubt this simply take a look at all apps based on Ethereum - there is not a single one,
which actually has a non-negligible user base.