Oh no, not Sri Lanka!!!! But all jokes aside, for small countries banning crypto is far easier than dealing with the ramifications of multinational criminal organizations trying to launder there money. Or even more recent news of Russian hackers using bitcoin to help sway the US election. What does a small country like Sri Lanka do when criminals try to go through their country to obscure the source of funds? Sri Lanka has a strong banker presence as well. The bankers want to protect themselves from crypto or at very least not have to spend money trying to stop this new technology from disrupting everything.

India has a major problem with tax evasion. They have gone to extremelly drastic measures to try to get people, especially the rich, to pay their fair share of taxes. Obviously, crypto makes it very easy for people to evade taxes so India is having a crackdown. I think we are at the moment in history everyone saw coming from the early in the bitcoin days. Governments are cracking down. However, soon people will realize the decentralized and anonymous possibilities of crypto make it impossible to stop. I have my popcorn ready!

Warren Buffet didn't invest in bitcoin because bitcoin poses a threat to the current banking system and government control. Two of the main things that made him the richest person in the world for so long. He is one of the primary beneficiaries of the current system. What benefit is there for him to change everything? He's too old to pivot to something new and that new thing might make the word *gasp* a more equal place. The same thing goes for Bill Gates. I think older people just want to keep things the same and not have to worry about any new fangled technology that leapfrogs everything else.

Facebook has the opportunity to make a truly creative social token. I had no doubt they would. Who wouldn't want a permanent record of everyone's preferences stored forever on the blockchain and even have to host your own servers? However, what they will realize is that anyone can use that blockchain and take the info for themselves. So they will have a hard time selling to advertisers that make up the bulk of their revenues. In the end they will use the token like a glorified gift card or store credit card. The world of blockchain technology is still evolving.

Having something terrible happen to me and my family not knowing how to find my seed words has been one of my biggest worries. My particular problem though is also that my family doesn't really know what bitcoin is, and they don't really care. Any detailed instructions I write, I need to write down on paper, but that could get lost in a fire or some such. If I put instructions on my computer or in the cloud, they could be found by a hacker...but more than likely no one in my family would even bother to look lol.

I think this was a technical bounce brought on by the overly negative news cycle lately. It seems to me like the big banks were waiting for an opportunity to create a bottom and they found one. Most of the worries about regulation are now well known to everyone in the banking world. They have already talked about crypto in a hundred meetings and they know exactly what the plan for the future is. Us plebs will just have to wait and see what they decide...

If you could brute force bitcoin addresses it wouldn't be very useful as a currency, would it? Even the (theoretical) quantum computers of the future will have a problem finding any bitcoin wallets with bitcoins in them. Even the wallets that are found are not going to be worth the energy consumed in the process of finding them. There is only really one wallet that matters and that is Satoshi's wallet. Since its easy to patch bitcoin to be quantum-proof, but would require you to move your coins to a quantum-proof wallet, the Satoshi wallet may be up for grabs by a quantum computing team, if in-fact Satoshi no longer has access to that wallet (or is not alive any longer).

If you want to try an experiment out for yourself, change your one of the seed words to your wallet. Do that 1000x and see if you get any free bitcoins!

I think a lot of you are forgetting something very important. What will you do if you hit your head or die? Have you written clear instructions on what this random garble of words is so that your surviving relatives have some sort of clue how to access your bitcoin? It's not enough to just store you seed phrase, you also need to leave instructions on where it is stored and let people know about how much it is worth. I know if I got hit by a bus tomorrow, a bunch of people would be able to follow my instructions and get that bitcoin out.

Without a doubt bitcoin mining got way ahead of itself. But the price of video cards is finally going back down. There is a lot of competition in the mining space and a lot of risk. If you aren't willing to relocate repeatedly, you could have your power shut off. A lot of areas absolutely hate the idea of bitcoin mining for some reason and governments don't appreciate it when they are subsidizing power and bitcoin miners take advantage of that. I think more bitcoin miners need to be in places that want heat. That would at least do something.

I don't think that has the same effect I'm looking for. From the merit stats page I can see who has been merited recently, but that doesn't help me when I am scrolling through dozens of posts in "altcoin discussions" looking for hidden gems and actual thoughtful analysis. I think my idea would make it so someone can start in the topic they are already interested in and clearly see the quality posters as they browse. At the moment I have to follow good posters and hope they decide to post in a topic I am interested in. Also, recently merited and most merited don't show consistency of quality posts. Maybe someone wrote their first good post ever or they got 50 merits all at once for some infographic about the merit system and the rest of their posts are garbage...

So I am not the best or most technical post writer, so I don't earn very many merits, however I do READ these forums constantly. I am very invested in cutting through the spam to quality posts.

Looking at rank is one way to quickly filter posts, but that can leave you missing out on good information by someone new... So I think this forum should implement a "Featured Users" system. The Featured Users system would highlight or in some way promote users who regularly earn merit for their posts. This could be a ratio, like if the user gets merited 1/10 posts they would be considered a Featured User. Another idea would be if they have been merited recently, or if they get merited consistently in certain board like "Legal" or "Meta".

I think this would help out the merit sources as well, since it would be easier for them to find jr members who are creating quality posts, follow them, and continue to award merits for their posts.   

We live in a weird time where people consider property to be a profitable investment. Property should at most maintain its value with a very small gain based on increasing population. Real estate shouldn't have the 10%-20% gains every year we have been seeing in major cities worldwide. People used to see owning a house as an inflation hedge. A way to store there money that would keep up with the government's printing of money. It's this false thinking about property values that caused the 2008 financial collapse and we will see the same thing happen again as millennials get priced out of the housing market and eventually prices fall. 

Bitcoin seems to be a very sentiment driven asset. It is very profitable to control the news cycle and make the lows lower and the highs higher. It always seems to me there is a huge news push right before a reversal. I have been very successful at trading during these moments. It's easy to tell when the stats are screaming oversold or overbought but the news is saying the opposite. I have noticed recently that a lot of the panic selling has settled down a bit. Things didn't go as low as i expected and bounced back well.

Blockchain phones would be a great idea of they were decentralized. A big company coming out with blockchain technology is probably going to fail. They are mostly just seeing it as an opportunity to offload some of their data center costs onto the mining/staking community. Any centrally controlled coin is really missing the point of the blockchain.

Imagine a future where there are actually decentralized phones. Phones not controlled by an oligopoly or a local monopoly, but truly decentralized worldwide phone service. It may be possible. Actually, it may be inevitable.

I really don't think bitcoin is used for money laundering as much as the banks and governments want you to believe. It's like "human trafficking". How do you know how much criminal activity 'actually' happens? The cops have an incentive to make the number look crazy high so they get as much funding as possible and nobody else really studies the subject. Any sort of crime stat that estimates how much money laundering really goes on is making at best an educated guess.

Paypal is truly the worst. I just had someone "accidentally" put $130 into my account and then email me saying I stole the money and to return it to them right away. Of course I just ignored this person. They even tried to contact me on facebook messenger! In the end paypal reversed the transaction without me having to do anything. I guarantee if I had sent that money back I would be out $130 right now.

Paypal also is still holding $150 I tried to use to buy a painting by a Cuban artist (in Miami). Because the transaction had the word "Cuban" in it they are basically going to hold my money until I get a letter from the treasury department...

I'm not an accountant, but...

For a US citizen you should report any signature campaign taxes at the moment you sell your bitcoin. If you were paid in bitcoin for the signature campaign, the bitcoin you earned would change your cost basis. Now you earned an amazing 0.01 bitcoin for a signature campaign. Your cost basis for this 0.01 bitcoin is 0, since you didn't pay anything for it. To keep things simple, I would recommend keeping your bitcoin separate or keeping all the documentation you need to separate your dates on your tax forms. But lets imagine you didn't keep any documentation or the IRS thought your proof was insufficient. You will likely have to pay taxes on the full 0.01 bitcoins. If you sold the 0.01 bitcoins for say, $120 you would pay the capital gains tax of 15% on the full $120.

I am actually very interested in this question. A 51% attack *should* be illegal. Although I think actual laws addressing 51% attacks specifically are a long long ways off. In a lot of ways governments have an incentive to never make laws that would improve the stability of bitcoin or crypto coins. If there were laws, especially international laws that made 51% attacks illegal the price of cryptos would be much less volatile. Although the laws would not prevent attacks completely, it would signal to the average person that the crypto world is a controlled and monitored market. Government may never accept crypto and protect its very specific needs.

I think the real question here is, is any money you put anywhere "safe"? The USD is only valuable because of the faith that everyone puts in it. The same with stocks, bonds, gold, and soybeans. Tomorrow everyone could decide that all all-soy diet will change their life and make them lose weight and soybeans could end up becoming very valuable because people believe other people will buy those soybeans in the future. You have to remember the bitcoin is deflationary and a fixed supply and dollars are not fixed. It is also possible to hedge your bitcoin bets with futures contracts or by shorting at the right times, setting stop-losses, etc.

My guess is the IRS will follow policies ideas they will borrow from the stock market. The IRS could 1) Treat forks like stock splits, 2)Treat forks like a merger or 3) Treat forks like a reverse merger

1) Treat forks like stock splits - When a stock splits you get a ratio (usually 2:1). If you held 100 shares prior to the split, now you have 200 shares and your cost-basis remains the same. This makes since to me as a way to calculate the cost-basis of PoS coins or tokens. It works the same as dividends paid in stock. Crypto Example: You own 400 "XYZ" Coins with a basis of $250 per coin (total basis of $100,000). You earned 40 additional XYZ coin from staking and now own a total of 440 XYZ. Your total basis is unchanged, so your basis per share is now $100,000 divided by 440, or $227.28. Clearly, this doesn't make sense for a fork, since there is a "new" coin created. But its important to understand stock splits to understand mergers.

2)Treat forks like a merger - Imagine you own company/coin A and it merges with company/coin B and all your company/coin A shares become company/coin B shares. You can look up what the terms below mean and how to calculate them, but for the purpose of discussing forks the details will bog everything down too much.

To calculate your cost basis you need to know:
a) Your original cost basis for company/Coin A  
b) The taxable gain (or loss) "realized" in the merger/fork taking into account any cash received No forks to date have had a cash payout
c) The taxable gain (or loss) recognized in the merger/fork
d) The total basis in the new company B stock/coin
e) The gain/loss on fractional shares

But here we have a problem too. A "merger" isn't happening when we are looking at forks. The action looks most closely like a reverse merger, which is much rarer and is one of the most common ways for large companies to defer taxes. It may be possible to defer taxes using strategies similar to reverse merger tax strategies.

3) Treat forks like a reverse merger - I actually ran out of time researching this one because reverse mergers are so convoluted (to me anyway). I'll be back with an edit soon! Stay tuned!