Legal tender is separate from money. Northern Irish and Scottish bank notes aren't legal tender in England. Scottish bank notes aren't even legal tender in Scotland. Legal tender's definition is a narrow one. Tons of stuff can be called money without being legal tender and it's easy to think many a Bitcoin fan doesn't regard it as money either.

This wee angle isn't super relevant.

I'm glad he acknowledged it's a dumb comparison because it is one. They do also acknowledge it's human nature to make the comparison.

Everyone's going to have a different version of what winning means. In plenty of ways it already has gone further than anyone could possibly have hoped for in the time it has considering the nature of its origins.

Interesting that he picked up on the valley of death thing which I think is very relevant but rarely mentioned. Comes a time when the expectations of existing speculators won't be met and you'd hope some more measured usage would be there to meet that drop in interest. That's possibly the biggest challenge in it moving forward in a timely manner.

It doesn't matter what they think of as 'real money'. The only thing that matters is value and how it moves. You could be paid in someone's idiot cousin's finger paintings and they'll tack a value on to it and tax accordingly if they identify it as income.

Track record and evidence of competence are the main ones. I wouldn't bother with anything that didn't have extensive reviews and reported experiences from others. Even then there are places that really are not inspiring as to how they operate so I'd need to be satisfied that they were doing things right before considering them.

It constantly blows my mind the amount of people turning up here asking whether they should trust a service that literally no one else has ever heard of. Why would you? Then again they're most likely the owner of the service.

Almost all of the time tax is taken on trust anyway. It would require something pretty radical for them to investigate you.

It seems like a sensible policy regarding mining. Obviously no tax at all would be rather better but at least they're not as stupid or unworldly as other countries who attempted to put VAT on it.

So far BTC has been treated like foreign currency in UK tax terms. Profits from any foreign currency fluctuations are subject to capital gains taxes just as BTC is. It looks like not much has changed.

And this is while things are pretty much dead, apart from the occasional spurt. Just goes to show how incapable many people are of conceiving anything beyond the next five minutes.

It will make for a very dramatic spectacle at the height of a bubble, and maybe even more so when it pops.

I mentioned to pal of mine that he should think about getting some BTC at $250 in 2015. He said he'd wait. He finally called me up in 2017 looking to buy $3 XRP. 

The mindlessness of people never fails to boggle my mind.

There has to be one at some point, and the people who insist it's yet to come are the ones who get left behind. No one knows it's the bottom until long after it's been and gone. I presume there are plenty of 'hyperwave' tossers who are still sitting around waiting for $1000 and will be for the rest of their lives.

I can't think of any crypto casino that has any dealings with dollars at all. If they did they certainly wouldn't last very long.

You're right in saying that they're far more likely to keep a USD peg than other services. Perhaps their customers are much more reactive to the USD price than other services or they themselves only think in terms of finishing up with USD so plan accordingly.

I've always felt the altcoin section should be treated rather like the end of Silent Running - left alone to drift off into space to tend to itself in a poignant manner. A bit less Joan Baez though.

I think the creation of the altcoin speculation section was a fine idea. There's a higher quality of discussion in there by adding a little focus to it.

Perhaps there should be an upper tier alt section where a thread becomes eligible for entry if it has accumulated a certain amount of merit in total. Quite a few of the threads have someone actively running them so perhaps they could also agree to hold their users to a higher standard as a condition of entry.

I'm finding the whole thing rather befuddling. I don't know if Yobit has a trollbox but that's the most natural place to plant their manipulations. They can also place permanent banners on the trading pages which would be vastly more potent than attempting to draw people to a separate site.

And since the site pays to post you're going to get what you get here x100. No one is going to read anyone else's posts so nothing you attempt to plant is going to sink in. I can't imagine anyone would peruse it for worthwhile info. The only users you'll get there will be shitposters shitposting at each other who don't even know or care what they're shitposting about.

Interested to see what the end game is here. If nothing else I've never seen an approach quite like it before.

If anyone fears the areas in crypto they have full control over such as their own security then they ain't doing it right. There are enough tools and enough info out there to make yourself impregnable. Keep working on your set up until the idea of fearing something going wrong feels silly.

I think my main worry would be the majority simply losing interest. You can overcome anything if the collective will is there. If it has tailed off and faded away then it's good night. Impossible to know what could cause that but sometimes it feels people are a little too comfortable with the assurance of its future.

Xapo's been dead for many, many years now. Bitpay outside the US had the same card provider and has been dead just as long. It's still limping in the US.

It all depends on where OP is. There aren't any global cards any more. In the EU you have Wirex and Coinbase as the main options. In the US it's Bitpay but you can't extract cash with it any more.

Erm, try running for president out of the blue and see how many body parts you finish up with. Anywhere calling itself 'Peoples' or 'Democratic' is a surefire giveaway that they're anything but.

Don't sweat it. He's got the Tulip Trust to look forward to in a few short weeks, right?

Then we're all going to be reduced to cowed silence while he personally drives from door to door and forces us to inhale his red socks.

Obviously it's all about the post itself but if it's a total noob then I might be inclined to have a look at their other writings. If all of their other posts are nothing but yards of that Facebook/Twitter bounty shit then I may well be less inclined to make it rain.

One thing I definitely wouldn't do is randomly merit someone just because of who they are. There are plenty of longstanding members who don't write much of note.

From watching his proclamations I've grown to assume several people were using the account at once. It's wavered all over the joint and often directly contradicts previous statements a short while later. Or maybe he's just monged on khat after midday.

The higher one's rank the bigger the opportunity to burn your account and disappear will be. I've seen many a hint that a decent number of established members don't have a pot to piss in.

No one should be under any illusion that if something landed in a long standing member's lap the temptation to exploit it will be strong and it may only not have happened because the chance hasn't arrived yet. There are enough old schoolers here who wound up screwing people.

We'll never know whether it was a long con or spontaneous but the higher up you go the more is dangled in front of you if you've placed yourself in the right circles.

There've been people I've grown up with who turned around and fucked me for piffling advantage after knowing them for decades. On the internet I'd times that possibility by a few million no matter how carefully crafted someone's rep is.

This is the best advice here.

You can instantly tell when someone doesn't give a shit about what they're writing, doesn't understand or has inserted themselves into a thread without digesting what it's actually about. You discard the first sentence as quickly as you read it and move on to the next post. It's immediately obvious here's no substance there at all.

And I'd be just as willing to merit a good question as a good answer. No one has to pretend to be some sort of authority on a subject to have an opinion on it and that's another faux pas that comes up all the time.