Selling Bitcoin Cash as Bitcoin is fraudulent. Did your friend buy Bitcoin only to end up with Bitcoin Cash, or did he buy Bitcoin Cash thinking it was Bitcoin? The former is a crime that should be reported, while the latter could be chalked up to buyer's due diligence, or lack thereof, despite being a byproduct of legally and morally questionable marketing.

The problem with the Twitter issue is that the term Bitcoin isn't trademarked. It can't be said that the account is pretending to be someone else if there's no one who could legitimately claim the handle. It's free-for-all, and it just so happened that a hostile party got to it first.

That being said, I do hope something can be done about their marketing. They're free to claim that Bitcoin Cash is the closest thing to Satoshi's whitepaper all they want, and I would also have no qualms about them saying Bitcoin Cash should be Bitcoin. Saying Bitcoin Cash is Bitcoin, though, is not just outright misleading, but is also regrettably legal (as far as I know at least).

So, this was worded in such a way where an arm of Wikileaks was suspended, but not Wikileaks itself. Does this mean Wikileaks itself also has a Coinbase account, and that account has been left untouched? Or am I reading too much into this? Should that be the case, then I think it's too early to cry foul. Not defending Coinbase here, but there's a possibility that there could be a legitimate reason behind it.

For those who want to read the entire piece (not the one OP cited but same article anyway):

https://www.coindesk.com/russian-supreme-court-orders-review-of-crypto-website-ban/

The informational site was apparently banned because it was claiming that Bitcoin was a means of virtual payment, and was therefore undermining the Ruble lmfao. Whoever ordered the ban in the first place either hates Bitcoin or has a really itchy trigger finger.

I'm not expecting much because this is Russia, whom Putin basically rules by himself, but I do hope the bans with unreasonable backgrounds get overturned.

I would also like to add that hardware wallets are very specialized in that they're pretty much only used for cryptocurrency storage, which are worth a fortune nowadays. This means that it has a massive target on its back to hackers (and probably you, who owns one, by extension). The way it's built makes it hard, if not impossible to steal the contents remotely, but you never know when things might change.

You can find a somewhat extensive discussion regarding their downsides here.

They're still much safer than most other alternatives, but it's better to be aware of their pitfalls.

Well technically, there are still plenty of scenarios where you will have to trust third parties. Bitcoin users use exchanges, software wallets, hardware wallets, among other things, so you're trusting your money with them in essence. The trustless label refers to the peer-to-peer nature of Bitcoin not needing a third party payment processor and a central bank, etc. The system takes care of itself, but you still need to take care of yourself.

I just felt the need to clarify that because some newbie may read this and be under the false impression of absolute safety regardless of the choice of software and services. Great job otherwise!

It may not look it, because the dip at $6k was a better time to buy in hindsight, but the article was looking at it in a traditional investment perspective. Us investment plebs are told to buy dips so we tend to look at things differently, but what's flashing the buy signal in this particular case isn't the price; it is, rather, Bitcoin's moving average, which is a technical analysis tool.

But yeah I'm not a very big believer of technical analysis being particularly effective on Bitcoin, so this doesn't really affect me, but it could very well attract traditional investors into the market. It's going to turn out as a self-fulfilling prophecy more so than an actual accurate prediction in this case, but I'm not complaining lol.

This is really strange to me. I wonder what prompted this move. Are they simply future proofing, or have they been getting calls from law enforcement agencies? The way I see it, they're only providing a service for two people to be able to deal with each other, so there shouldn't be any need for them to implement KYC themselves, unless they want to protect their users from money launderers/criminals looking to liquidate, maybe? Or is it required of them because they offer an escrow service?

I do hope Localbitcoins come out with a statement of their own. I hope Paxful and the others don't follow in their footsteps though. Don't fix what isn't broken.

It's not as straightforward as that. The thing about Bitcoin is that it's really worth nothing unless you sell it or exchange it for goods. Right now you can say that you have around $8k if you have 1 Bitcoin, but not until you sell it.

The catch here is that, the more people sell, the lower the price goes. If everyone were to dump their coins, the collective money earned by everyone would be far less than Bitcoin's market cap, because the price is going to slide as everyone's selling.

There are really only two ways as far as I know: signing up for a cryptocurrency exchange and selling there, or peer-to-peer trading.

Exchanges are typically more convenient, but that would also depend on which exchanges are available to you. Some are better than others after all.

If you go the peer-to-peer route, you could look through sites like localbitcoins.com to sell online with a built-in escrow service, or look for meet-ups which are inherently riskier. You might also be able to sell on the Marketplace section of Bitcointalk, or social media platforms.

If neither of those options meet your needs, then you're in for a bad time.

Yes. There are actually figures behind this: check out this article.

From the URL alone, you'd be able to see that only 20% of ICOs are legitimate according to one study. Legitimate projects also have a chance to fail though, so if you read the article, it says only about 8% have gone far enough to end up on exchanges, and only about 47% of those are actually successful.

Taking these figures into consideration, this would mean that if you invest in an ICO blindly, you have about a 4% chance to actually profit lmfao. My advice is to stay away unless you absolutely believe in the vision and the team behind the project. If you come in for profit, you're going to end up getting burned.

I'd say interpreting it like that is a stretch. He was talking about cryptocurrencies specifically, and while it is a product of computer science, it's more of an application of a technology rather than the technology, which is the blockchain. He's also probably commenting about its effect as a speculative asset on people (as evidenced by his theory that it's a bubble and a mania), rather than its application as a technology -- in which case, he's correct that it cannot be explained by computer science. Even the most rabid Bitcoin fan can't deny that it's being treated more like a speculative asset/investment vehicle rather than its intended use of a currency by most people, so it's not like his opinion doesn't hold water.

Not that I agree with him of course, but this argument has already been beaten to death by other traditional economists and some very influential people on both sides of the fence. I personally don't believe it's a fad nor a bubble, but only time will really tell who's correct.

As much of a believer as I am of Bitcoin, I'd say the chances of a bank run happening because of crypto is very slim. Crypto is gaining popularity, but it's still very small in the grand scheme of things, and it's still more widely treated as a speculative asset and an investment vehicle rather than an actual alternative to fiat. I'd like to believe things are changing on that end, but it's coming on extremely slowly. Moreover, cryptos need to scale first and foremost, before we can talk about it being a viable replacement.

All in all, crypto certainly does have the potential to disrupt banking and fiat, but it's still way far off from reaching that potential. Governments/banks aren't afraid of it in its current incarnation -- they're afraid of its potential.

Wait what? There may have been a few ideas close to it in the past, but there has been no proof of concept until Satoshi came along with Bitcoin.


Well they put their ads first, but I don't know about blatant bias. There's an entire concept behind making sure your site shows up high on search results: search engine optimization. There may be some bias, but everything is mostly determined by algorithms.

I wouldn't be opposed to a decentralized search engine, but I personally don't see the need for it. Either way, Google can also adopt blockchain tech if needs be, so blockchain technology, and much less Bitcoin, are unlikely to lead to its death.

Woah, it looks like they actually have a solid case against the banking ban. I mean, crypto isn't even illegal there so it was clearly an unreasonable decision in the first place. I'm looking forward to a favorable ruling.


Yeah, this truly is concerning but the Supreme Court is in a different branch of the government in India, so it doesn't necessarily have to side with the executive and/or legislative. That means there is hope, no matter how small, that they can reach a favorable ruling despite powerful parties pulling the strings.

What conclusions would we need though? There's really no room for bias here. He posted evidence that the conference was a blockchain conference, which challenged Ver's claim about it being a Bitcoin Cash conference. I don't think a Bitcoin Cash event would market itself like that unless it was intentionally being misleading, in which case the buzz is invalid because its attendees came specifically for a blockchain conference. All of this, of course, is assuming the image he posted were legit. I doubt something like this would be fabricated though.

Regarding Roger Ver, I wouldn't be surprised if he actually were invited considering his popularity in the community, but I don't believe for a second that that was a Bitcoin Cash conference lol.

One thing to consider is that they can't "hack" you, if they don't get access to your private keys whether or not you use their software. There are plenty of tools that you can use to generate your private keys offline, and if you take special care that they're never exposed online, you're pretty much hack-free.

One easy example I can think of is an air-gapped PC with an Electrum wallet. You generate your keys offline, and make sure the PC doesn't ever go online again. Setting one up correctly means you're virtually hack-proof, except in cases where hackers have had physical contact with your device.

There are also open source projects, but other than that, yeah, you will have to trust developers.

As much as I agree that Bitcoin can disrupt the current way we do things, it does have fees. The goal is for those fees to be negligible, and while it currently is, that could change in an instant if the scalability issue isn't addressed. I would also contest security as a strong selling point because while it could be more secure, it could be more vulnerable than traditional banking storage in some instances.

If I were to point out qualities that could disrupt the system, I'd say decentralization, because nothing other than other crypto can boast that quality, and convenience, because you're able to send any amount anywhere cheaply and nearly instantly.

What points are you confused about?


Desktop wallets are your best bet. I personally recommend Electrum. Setting up a wallet with it is fairly straightforward, as are sending and receiving transactions. Try starting out with a standard non-segwit wallet (because some services do not support payments for segwit wallets), and be sure to set a strong password, and keep your seed words safe and offline. It also has a phone app. You can explore the other features later (like 2FA, Segwit, etc.), once you get the hang of things.

It also has a dedicated subforum here should you ever need help/support.

Something like that shouldn't happen, and you only need to post a few times to regain your rank in most cases where it does.

But to answer your question, Newbies and Jr. Members have the same signature limitations as far as I know, so for as long as you end the period as a Jr. Member, there shouldn't be any problems. It would still be best to contact your manager yourself though, of course.

Edit: Oops my bad. I thought the post-merit Jr. Member limitations basically got downgraded to a Newbie's.

I have a few questions:

• Why is it aimed at beginners? Are you implementing beginner-friendly features that other wallets don't have?
• Do testers have to install software on their computer?

This looks dangerous to me to be honest.