I think that it's not just the scarcity, but also the fact that the most powerful computer network in terms of processing power stands behind supporting this supply and the per-determined schedule for releasing more bitcoins. Every participant in this network holds a mutual interest to uphold these standards and any deviation would imminently have them kicked-out of the network, without being able to enjoy the monetary incentive of mining so long as they support different standards than the ones set in stone in the BTC chain.

To be perfectly honest, I don't care what people have been doing with their accounts. If there's demand for it, it can have market value. Beyond that, it's very hard to regulate what happens behind closed doors.

Forum mods should be impartial enforcing the rules on a case by case basis but trying to preach that bitcointalk is not an investment is something that many people would just not listen to. It's hard to enforce so to me just banning spammers is enough. I wouldn't want the mods of the website to be preoccupied with account transfers, going paranoid about such activity. Hunting spam is already a colossal task.

I don't like the new design of the blockchain.com block explorer, and I especially dislike how they make you go through a prompt about which blockchain you want to search into if you search with an address, also including Bcash there... But the feature where the value at the time of transaction was included is still there. Just search the transaction hash and it should be there at the bottom. For example:

Searching for: 12a7580280a67d7da6695eb01b798100385e0e04072dd155c98cd63fadd638c5
You will see the following:


It's in the Details section.

See: https://i.imgur.com/GJOZNjc.png

I think it's just because DEX have really small orderbooks, no market makers and the trade graphs are not regulated or intervened with in any way to look nice.

I would like to ask this forum about opinions on which candidate with chances to win either of the big party.

Issues at focus to draw out which candidate would be the lesser evil for BTC are (at least in my opinion):

• Free international trade.
• Less state involvement.
• Anti-surveilance.
• For absolute press freedom (especially concerning views on Julian Assange).
• Not favorable to the bank monopoly.

Democrat party:

Biden is quite pro-censorship and surveillance based on his voting record in spite of him stating the opposite:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_Joe_Biden#Internet_privacy_and_file_sharing
Biden is also close to the banking carted from his days as a state senator.

Warren regarded Julian Assange as a bad actor:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_Elizabeth_Warren#Prosecution_of_Julian_Assange
And supports a state-intervention policy to prevent banks from collapsing.

Sanders' policy against banks that are 'too-big-to-fail' might sound positive to some. If you're an accelerationist then sure you can interprate this as good for bitcoin, although indirectly. Although, his trade policy is one of the most protectionist ones even within the democrat party. To his credit, he has made statements favorable to Snowden and Assange and also against surveillance.

Andrew Yang is one of the very few candidates that has shown capability to personally comprehend cryptocurrency. His overall tone in regards to groundbreaking innovations in technology is that they should be utilized in a way that benefit would be spread to the greater population as much as possible; at least this is what I get with his views on a UBI as a follow up to AI and automation taking up jobs in the future. In regards to BTC, his proposed policies make direct reference to crypto, which is very impressive for a presidential candidate. However, his approach is not the most liberal. He is for regulating crypto on a federal level, something that many argue would improve the landscape and outlook for institutional-level investments to take place. He is certainly one of the more positive potential candidates, but the likelihood for him to be the nominee doesn't seem to be that great.

Republican party:
Donald Trump has a long record of supporting state-involvement, applying tariffs and initiating 'trade wars'. He's clearly not for free-trade and would succumb to any state-involvement for the sake of jobs, no matter how short lived that might be. He has also made pro-surveillance statements. He also has a history of personally attacking journalists and the media, which to me is quite conflicting to see coming from a president.

Bill Weld seems to be a libertarian at hear. He has made favorable statements towards Snowden, is against all surveillance, pro international trade and also supports a very fiscally conservative budget policy. His positions on big banks are unclear but he himself has a banker background. Although this sounds interesting: During Weld's tenure, the Attorney General's office prosecuted some of New England's largest banks in cases involving money laundering and other white-collar crimes. Sad to say, but historically speaking, libertarian candidates don't fair well in the presidential race.

Overall, I think that no candidate of those with chances to win the nomination in one of the two big parties appears to stand behind liberties and freedom sincerely when it comes to both finance and online communications.

Off the Candidates above, I would say that Bill Weld is the 'lesser evil'. But provided that he's the least known of all the aforementioned and the republican party hasn't had many candidates so far, I think it'd be important to go for a second choice.
Personally, I'm putting more weight on positions related to big banks and internet freedom if we're talking about bitcoin. In that regard, Bernie Sanders appears to be a better choice. His tax increases and increased socialist style welfare might indirectly contribute to reduced financial choice, which of course isn't pro-bitcoin, but on the other hand, for a four year term, I'd be willing to overlook that provided that other candidates have worse positions.

Edit log (for transparency):

To be honest, I see a very conflicting run for whoever is a democrat in the US. I'm not from there personally but I find it ironic how the last election's runner-up candidate (Bernie) is a democratic socialist, while this year so far in the polls his percentages keep looming around Biden and Warren, two establishment-friendly politicians that have conflicting positions even within their own platform. If I was a democrat I'd be split between Bernie who's known to be honest in his voting record and also adamant with his positions, and the lesser of two evils between establishment candidates that have better chances to take the lead (as Hilary did).

Scalabillty is not about the price. Whatever solution is proposed to allow for more transactions to be completed through bitcoin, price of BTC shouldn't be the primary factor of consideration. Solutions are focused on how much immutability and security are up-kept, along with opportunity to participate in the decentralized network. Of course it is still an issue but for any proposal to materialize with satisfactory ways to fulfill the demand at high standard, it's going to take time and a lot of testing. Side-chains are a proposed solution that are likely to be utilized on bitcoin.

But really, all this fuss in 2017 might have been artificial. Now we're left with a bunch of altcoins that have 'bitcoin' in their name but in the end have less transactions per second, although supposedly solving the scalability issue.

That's a nice list. Sadly, with social media having a userbase existing is the largest thing needed. We might have more than a dozen Social media accounts for this reason, and demand for more isn't really there. Crypto goes really well with social media though and I wist more would integrate it, existing or new ones, either is good. Maybe older social media could also learn from good implementations from new competitors.

Funnily enough, reviewers in ICObench are repeatedly caught soliciting their positive reviews for ICOs and icobench does nothing. AFAIK a positive review from some of the top ones would start from 50$, going upwards to god knows what with perks added like becoming a project advisor. Some were speculating that ICObench had created these personas of reviewers to skim some cash from foolish project managers.

At times of extreme stagflation and hunger gold could surely net you a lot of currency. But people then were not interested in monetary value as much as for mere survival. Value isn't a universal notion. Gold might have a more tangible sense to how its valued but context also matters, because in an economy you're not alone. If you're shopping for survival maybe money in general is not a good currency.

Iran is far from a socialist economy. They'd be closer to a European standard Democratic-Socialist economy based on the constitution's vision for public retirement funds, health and medicaid as well, funded by taxes. Oil is a large factor in the economy still though and the government is more of a big-state bonkers autocracy other than anything else. Too much spending on military and foreign influence campaigns while people in the mainland are starving. It doesn't take long to guess why there's unrest all so often in there. Also important to note than many of the social programs were cut, supposedly in an effort to move the country closer to developing a free market, but I think it was just a move by the government to  buy time from a collapse.

Iran also claims to be self-sufficient to a large extent, but really this internal disincentive from more participation in international trade probably stifles their potential for development even more. The local economy was never in a good shape and the spiraling inflation rate is a good indicator of what actually keeps them up and running as they are. With welfare cut, and the currency collapsing, nobody is saved. The middle class loses money while they sleep and even the poorest can no longer access basic services as the government can only keep decreasing such welfare.

Makes sense to me that they'd want to burn the banks there. Iran is one of the extreme cases of how FIAT keeps crazy regimes in power, but the people have the power to say no, starting from the ground up by denouncing the government currency.

Another unknown person showing up claiming that they met Satoshi. Let's see where this one is going to end up. This seems like a low effort troll that won't get far but I want my place in the first page just in case.

Digital transactions increase transaction efficiency, but also increase traceability and carry a larger systemic risk. People should be cautious in terms of what extent of support they show to a cashless society. Central banks can already print money on demand, if there isn't even cash then there's nothing to hold them back from taking the largest part of society down with them if the situation calls for such.

As other said, are you sure you're on the same wallet? Can you check to see if you have access to the same addresses?

Maybe you'd recognize some of them, their inputs, outputs or balances. Check on the blockchain to see.

Very detailed answer and thanks for putting out up-to date step-by-step instructions. Maybe you should make a separate OP with a tutorial on the matter.

Also I've gotta say that getting meritted by Greg Maxwell is in my book one of my top 'Hi mum' kind of moments moments for my time in this forum. I'll cherish it.

Some very nice efforts here by the community, and I'd like to applaud the work people do to assist new and rising forum members. What's interesting to me though, is that the current situation with merit calls for action to assist people that might be high quality posters, but are still new to the forum. This way, they sort of have an advantage in gathering merit compared to older merits; as only the new members would be stuck in the lower ranks without it. Interesting to think about, but it's just virtual internet points in the end.

I think a crypto exchange could utilize its connections to make a better tamper-proof solution for payments. With the minimum friction possible, somebody could receive crypto payments and send them to his bank account. Then service providers like PHb could utilize this to send crypto payments, avoid the risk of being shut down, and also continue providing their service uninterrupted. Uphold tries to do this but to be honest I don't really like how they're lying about their fees, hiding them in exchange rates.

This is a nice analogy, I'll have to admit. Helped me realize that I might not be phrasing my concerns and points as I should.
I didn't mean that this feature should allow for responses that wouldn't be seen by anyone. But rather, allowing responders to choose if they'd want to limit the pump power they'll give to the OP with heir response. I've edited my OP accordingly.

Of course it is qualified as plagiarism and should be reported as such. Copy-pasting from anywhere without proper credit and in a way that's made out to be as your own creation is plagiarism. Especially here that the plagiarized text is 100% of the author's post.

The thing is, it probably won't be valued much if anything. ETH has the first comer advantage in the smart contract field and that's hard to overcome. There's so much support behind its chain that a move would a substantial amount of time to showcase a better alternative in my opinion.