This crappy article doesn't illuminate anything. There's plenty of wariness and scepticism about BTC from the US government but little evidence of any sustained assault. The recent Libra hearings were overall positive about it I'd say.

As for Tim Cook - "I really think that a currency should stay in the hands of countries. I’m not comfortable with the idea of a private group setting up a competing currency,"

No private group will ever be permitted to set up a competing currency and Libra will never happen, nor any other similar thing. Luckily totally open groups can.

Tons of people are already signed up to the hilt there. The only way they can get any type of return though is by lending to nutters. It's says enough that no long established operation is doing it other than through their trading platforms and Circle have already fucked enough people with their Clams balls up.

The faintly legit places that offer this do it entirely on the basis of finding other individuals willing to pay your interest. As we've seen with the wildly fluctuating terms and payment levels from Blockfi it wavers all over the place and it super reactive to what they can squeeze out of their borrowers.

It's a bit of a stretch to call it interest earning. You're really a lender in the most basic sense.

If Coinbase offered a rock solid and boring 2-3% no doubt it would be swamped. They have no safe way of making that pay so we're stuck with places that look fancy on the surface but might blow up any moment.

It's not really that epic an achievement to get that many merits and you can manage it without being a particularly stunning or established member. I think it would be better kept for the proper OGs. There'll always have to be a cut off somewhere and opening it up to people who might have only been here for a year or less doesn't make much sense.

I presume someone has to manually activate and send them to you. That's the only thing that can explain this requirement. Unless they maintain someone to do it for 5-10 years or more it's going to be a shitshow.

I can just about wrap my head around fucking off the stakeholders who missed the boat. There was plenty of warning and very little actual money on the line. That is not the case this time around.

I guess ultimately it's not a fork and XEM holders are being 'invited' to get new coins but this will just continue the PR problem.

Dying from within is indeed the only way it's going to happen.

If users, miners and developers give up on it then all you're left with is some useless code. Even then some enthusiasts may keep it ticking over but it would be a curio from then on.

I've no idea what would inspire a mass walkout but nothing else will kill it off.

It's not about the smokes, it's about the locations.

In France you literally cannot buy cigarettes, tobacco and all the adjacent paraphernalia anywhere other than an officially sanctioned tobacco shop. Not supermarkets, other shops, gas stations, bars, vending machines, nothing. Because of that they're absolutely everywhere and they usually sell plenty of other stuff like phone cards and sweets and so on.

I don't think accepting BTC will achieve shit. Selling it could be useful but I'll guess they'll put a huge markup on it. All of these schemes seem to die fairly rapidly as indeed did this one until it seems to have popped back again. Doubt it'll be around for long again.

I doubt he's created anything of note in living memory, not that his memory goes over the five minute mark these days.

It all depends on which miscreant he recruited to make it, or more likely approached him with it already done and looking for hype.

You never know, perhaps the miscreant knows what he or she was doing. I'll let others find that out.

Pah. It's got to be funded from the Genesis block or nothing. I don't care if that block is unspendable. They'll just have to unstick it. And nominated descendants should be guaranteed dust from the very final block ever mined in 2140.

Ledger seem like a bunch of snooty pricks. I don't like their attitude and I don't like the Nano I have either. I'm a Trezor girl.

Is the platform saying the address is not recognised when you input it? Something automated preventing it is the only scenario where I can see this being an issue. There's certainly nothing stopping a full legacy system sending out to a segwit address.

Why not just open another legacy wallet? Most wallets have this option.

Is this a previously unknown Y2K style bug or just a fond fantasy?

I enjoy discussing problems that won't need solving until we're all dead. I wish more problems were like this.

Not sure if it's the case any more, but at one point Yahoo would make your address available again if you hadn't logged in for six or more months.

I've had the same thing with dead or forgotten recovery systems. I find it really annoying when gmail won't let you in. There should be a 'you're on your own' option that doesn't make these demands as sometimes you can't meet them.

If there ever is to be a government crypto it'll make the case for Bitcoin several times more compelling than it already is. The present set up is a groaning morass of systems of varying ages with varying levels of accessibility and communication.

A governmentcoin would be under their absolute and instant control. Any whim could be executed immediately and no one has any redress. The only escape would be... Bitcoin.

I fully expect Bitcoin to survive in the long term. The case for its existence is too obvious to ignore. I also expect much of what we're used to about it now to be long gone eventually.

You'd have to be very confident in your ability to create a strong enough password and being able to remember it is probably more important.

Anyone thinking of doing so would do well to spend a while researching the best way of creating strong and memorable ones. I have plenty of encrypted folders with variations on long term passwords that I can't remember. There's nothing of importance in them so it doesn't really matter. It obviously would in this case.

I would prefer nodes run by Nazis or UFOs in the hollow Earth. Better to broadcast up from the centre than from multiple locations in orbit. As for the solar system, I read about ansibles in Ender's Game so I would favour the creation of one of those to sort this problem out.

I don't care. Nor should anyone else currently alive. It is interesting to ponder though.

For a brief moment during the rapiest fees in 2017 miners made more from tx fees than they did from the block reward so it is possible. The far less certain thing is how consistent they'll be as obviously the block reward is 100% dependable.

If Bitcoin is still alive by then it will still be called Bitcoin but I doubt there'll be one single scrap of anything it shares with what we call Bitcoin today other than the name. There's no way of knowing how it'll be secured by then. There may not be any need for mining at all. Maybe our hive mind will validate and process things.

The same policy they've always followed. Their power to approve a product exists because they can police the market it'll operate in. Most ETFs run only in long established US markets that they have complete oversight of. They can reach and nail anyone who is proven to be acting nefariously.

You can't do that with Bitcoin. It's a market that runs 24/7 worldwide on largely unregulated exchanges. And many of those exchanges will be raping customers, faking volume, front running and more.

The whole thing will have to be massively cleared up before they'd even think of considering it and that may never happen.

The definitive and unequivocal erasure of Chinese mining would be one of the most positive things that could possibly happen. I don't believe it's any kind of threat as is, but killing off this wrong-headed notion once and for all would certainly do us all a favour.

The biggest miners will have spread themselves far and wide in anticipation of this possibility. If a large amount of hashing disappears for good then the algorithm takes care of it as it always has.

Some nincompoops will say 'but then this glut of redundant miners will be sold to 51% attackers' or, just maybe, they'll go to... other miners?

No bleedin' WAY is that typical. I've run plenty of stuff through Kraken and not once have they ever asked for anything other than the initial ID and proof of address and that was about four years ago now. I've never heard of Coinbase asking for any extra intrusive info. They either let you play or tell you to sod off. There's no hostage taking.

Bitstamp seem to specialise in asking for stuff that I've never, ever heard any 'real' financial institution asking for. Why the fuck would you give that to a bunch of anonymous Slovenes?

OP was not clever using open gambling funds. Most exchanges would've given him the boot for that. Good on him for getting one over on them.