900 is really low, I was checking it two days ago and it was 6000. Still, I am afraid that your diagnosis (lost interest) is true and I can only hope that the cure didn't kill the patient. I hope, that is, that the interest is not lost permanently because people had been dissapointed in Bitcoin.

wow, a new nobrainer business model has emerged! It used to be like this: take a catchy name, like "cash", "gold", "diamond" or whatever, prefix it with Bitcoin and voila! Now, the new model is the following: take an existing name of a coin, and postfix it with "Cash"! So you have Litecoin Cash, Ripple Cash etc...

The new model requires even less creativity. No need for catchy names anymore!

Maybe, if I can suggest an even better approach: Hey devs! There are some unused postfixes from the first iteration. What do you think of Litecoin-Gold or Ripple-Diamond?

EDIT: obviously I judged the book by its cover, but it is you who provided this cover that just shouts "judge me, mate!"

As much as I am happy that Amazon will accept bitcoin as means of payment, I think that the thread title (Amazon will accept bitcoin speculation) is misleading at best.

Accepting speculation implies that amazon runs a form of an exchange or a trading platform. Amazon is known to be a very tech-savvy corporation, so this possibility cannot be immediately excluded.

could you guys provide a link or a source?

Providing such breaking news (about restriction of transactions of digital currencies by one of the major European countries) without any link is kind of misleading, immediately one starts to look for a second bottom behind such a post ... at least I do   And I have been reading coindesk a moment ago and didn't see any such news.

It is great the transaction fee is lower now but SegWit is only part of it! When bitcoin was heavily traded and there were like 200 000 unconfirmed transactions, no doubt they were not able to fit into mined blocks and (SegWit or no SegWit) only the highest fee transactions were selected by miners and confirmed.

Now, with only 5 000 unconfirmed transactions (2.5 % of previous demand), all of them will be included in a few next blocks no matter if the fee is high or low.

So the demand is the main factor here. SegWit only proportionally reduces the transaction size and thus a fee and also makes it easier to fit more transactions into one block, helping when the demand gets really high. It is helping, but definitely SegWit is not a decisive factor here.

My maximal waiting time was 2 weeks for bitcoin transaction in December, but at that point I was really nervous and uncomfortable. From that moment on I learned a valuable lesson of always estimating and applying reasonably high transaction fee.

With other coins, they normally don't get clogged and it is usually a matter of a few blocks. Exact confirmation time depends on their specific new-block-generation-time.

It is a nobrainer, mate. The only founds that should be kept online are the ones that you actively trade. Then, there is no alternative.

But any founds not actively traded should be kept in your wallet and if this is a long-term state, then preferably a hardware wallet or cold storage.

The pros or cons, you ask? Security is on stake, here. If you keep your founds online you risk them, and that's it.

I am confused with your reasoning, to say the least.

I thought you were referring to what Satoshi had to say on that matter in his White Paper. When you said 'misinterpret' it clearly indicated interpreting the WP. Now you are saying that I should disregard what Satoshi said entirely, because he didn't have all the facts.

Satoshi said what he said and he clearly ment peer to peer electronic cash in his WP.

What is that blockstream? Are you referring to the US corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockstream ?
If yes, well, probably they think of bitcoin what brings them most profit at that moment.

I am not so sure it will be legal, at least for US were I think majority of users come from. Did you know that US sued (in US courts) the Switzerland bank for not disclosing that one of their customers was an American and not surprisingly US won and (maybe more surprisingly) eventually the bank paid the fine? Of course all the banking was done in Switzerland, but still US could intervene. So it seems that US can prosecute you no matter were you do your banking. I am not sure on what Israel may or may not do.

This article is on a different but closely related story: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/04/us-switzerland-tax-dodging-sue-banks_n_948362.html

It seems to be happening in waves: in 2014/15 there was a boom for new coins and literally hundreds of them were created, but they just went to be obsolete with few exceptions (doge, for that matter) when the wave has passed. Now there is a new wave but it will pass too. What remains after each new wave passes are those hundreds of coins worth a fraction of a dollar on coinmarketcap.com

you know, currently trasaction fees are equal to a fraction of a dollar. No doubt it is fuelling the Venezuelan adoption too.

It is no longer like it used to be in December, with transaction fees skyrocketing to 20 or 50 bucks.

Oh I will definitely read more on the subject. At least in my country (terminology differs but I think it is legally the same) what you are describing takes 25 years to take effect. 25 years is not 3.

I have read on Swiss banks actively using founds deposited by holocaust victims during WWII, so banks do that too.

The mechanism behind limiting the supply is called "halving", when miners' reward for new blocks is decreased by half from that moment on. We had already such an event twice: from 50BTC to 25BTC and then to 12.5BTC per newly mined blocks. It didn't cause any great fluctuations in terms of neither mining capacity nor the price.

As the first two halvings didn't have any noticable impact, and as each new halving concerns less bitcoins than the previous one (and in the future it will be a matter of fractions of bitcoins only),  so I don't expect that there be any impact of those future halvings and in particular the last halving (which will eliminate the reward completely) whatsoever.

uhhh, that is dirty. What intention might one have to purchase and hodl crypto?

In Israel they have recently introduced a new law that sais about treating bitcoin as property, and it entitles them to first tax it 17% VAT and then on top of that 25% capital gain tax, 42% of taxes in total.

Do you have a wallet already? Set up yourself a wallet first, it will give you so called public address, and you can give that address to the airdrop provider. Usually they are ERC20 related tokens so MyEtherWallet is a great option for starters.

And then ... you can do really nothing, you can save your founds and by logging daily to your wallet observe your balance EDIT: in the cryptojargon it is called hodling, like holding but with 'l' and 'd' misplaced

so what you mean by that is abondoning bitcoin entirely and using alts end-to-end instead. The thing is I still believe in bitcoin and I would rather find some way for it to adapt then just throw it away and have it replaced.

Also, the scaling in the alt space is done by having multiple alts and multiple blockchains. Any single alt will run into the same throughput problems as bitcoin did, the moment it is as successful as bitcoin.

I have noticed people talk about transacting bitcoin through alts, but it is something that I've never understood very well. It would seem that to convert bitcoin to altcoin you first need to have your bitcoin in an exchange. And provided you don't keep your founds online (which is not secure to say the least) you need at least one bitcoin transaction to do it. So I don't understand benefits of transacting through alts, really, if sending bitcoin directly is one transaction too

Unless you ment abondoning bitcoin completely and using alts only (?)

No they will not. They will tax it. I have just read in another thread, that Israeli government treats bitcoin as property so it can tax it first with VAT (17%) then with capital gain tax (up to 25%) arriving at a nice forty-two percent! Almost half!

Sure, 540 MB is huge, I admit it even though I am an advocate of block increases. This is why I thought of small increases over time, because I am sure that in, say, 10 years 540 MB block will not be considered huge anymore.

Currently 540MB per block (=78 Gb per day) is infeasible also because setting up a new full node requires downloading the full history and it would take months or years if the increment were 78 Gb each day (it takes days or weeks with current block size). However, it is all currently only.

nice. twenty-five percent and seventeen percent makes a nice forty two percent. Almost half of the money people make on bitcoin goes to the pocket of Israeli government. I have always known that the govs will regulate it eventually with the purpose of taxing it, but I have really mixed feelings about returning half of your money back.

And other governments will follow, if not now, eventually they will.

And in the middle ages the royalty was considered greedy because they taxed their subjects with 10% taxes....