I don't think that will happen. I haven't heard that futures launch is going to be postponed, so I'm assuming that for better or for worse, this will happen tomorrow as predicted (CBOE first, and then CME on the 18th). Whales have a great opportunity to make money with bitcoin, and that means banks can make money as well, and they probably will. This is all just talk, because I'm sure they are also going to "play" with bitcoin. Also, bitcoin will only pose a real threat to banks when the lightning network gets deployed. Until then, BTC will behave as gold, and as an asset, so they should be fine, since they will still control fiat, and that is still going to be the payment method used around the world.

Right now, bitcoin is not good for small transactions, but if you compare the fees you would pay on a very big transaction, then you would see that bitcoin would be great for that. The fees would be minimal, compared to the amount of the transaction, and you would also avoid bank bureaucracies. Also, holding bitcoin is quite secure, so using BTC as a store of value, just like gold, is also amazing. If you want to do fast small transactions I would sugest you to use LTC, monero or dash for example. There are so many coins out there, you must choose the right one for the each objective.

I do believe in lending platforms, and if they manage to deal with regulation they might get huge. I don't know those two, but I do know Salt, that looks very promising to me. I lost a lot of money because I had to withdraw bitcoin in order to pay bills, but with these platforms, or at least with Salt, I could just use my crypto as collateral and get a fiat loan in my bank account, without spending my coins. This is really good, as the increase in price could actually pay the loan by itself.
I think the main problem these platforms might find is to be legal, since lending is still very tied to banks. If we start having platforms like these available, banks will need to adjust their interest rates for sure.

It's really hard to say what will happen after futures gets launched (which is tomorrow). A lot of people is expecting a very big correction, from a 20% to 50% decrease in price, so it could be worthy to wait a little longer, and get bitcoins at a cheaper price. BTC is still very close to it's all time high, and still way ahead from where it was in just three days ago, so the correction everyone is talking about wouldn't be that strange. Of course we all know that BTC is very unpredictable, so I guess that the wise move would be to maybe invest half of your funds in case BTC goes up, and then decide what to do with the rest.

You should try a wallet like electrum, but I'm sure that many other wallets let you decide which fees to use. They normally give you a recommendation, based on how the network is doing, and you can choose at which block you are trying to get your transaction stored (normally each blok takes about 10min to be confirmed). Depending on your priority, you pay higher or lower fees. I don't think flat fees are a good option, because they always depend on how the network is doing.

You can also check this link, in order to see the number of unconfirmed tx on the network. If the number is above 100k, the fees are normally a bit high.

https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions

It's hard to say, but it could be. As usual, new coins that attempt to enter the market will need to bring something new, in order to have a chance to take out the other well established coins, otherwise there is no point in changing or even trying them. Cardano looks like a legit coin, and they are trying to solve the known issues of the current coins. They have a really good plan, they seem very committed, and their team looks very competent, so I think they are way ahead of neo, and if they manage to deploy everything they are promising, they might be able to compete with Ether.

I think you are mixing things. Steam had bitcoin as a payment method, so if you see things that way, then volatility is a bad thing, because it's hard to keep stable prices. You can buy something and then the price goes up, and you payed a big rice for that game, or the price can go down, and if steam didn't converted the BTC for cash, then they lost money. Volatility might be a good thing for trade, or an investment, if the price is going up, but it's not a good things for buying goods. They also complained about the fees if I'm not mistaken. I understand the move, and it doesn't really hurt bitcoin in my opinion. Right now BTC is an asset class and is tied to investments, and that is not a bad thing, because it means that a lot of money will come into bitcoin.

I only started trading recently, and I'm more of a scalper my trades don't offer me a ver big profit. I normally try to win around 1% a day, and I think that in my best day I did around 6%. It's not much, but since I'm usually not exposed for to long, and my trades are quite fast, I was quite happy with this result. If you think about, even a 1% daily average, is 30% a month. If you manage to trade with a big bank, then it's quite a lot of money. I'm still testing this strategy with $100 bucks. I will try to get to $500, and then I decide if I invest some more, or If I just keep going like that.

Why is everyone bashing coinbase here. I never heard of bad reports from other users until now, and they look safe. I know there were some users that lost funds on their accounts, but it wasn't a coinbase issue, and although their accounts got hacked, the problem wasn't from the coinbase side from what I heard. I'm not defending them, but until now I never heard of any issues with them.

Also, the OP is saying that the tx are pending, so I'm guessing the money wasn't even deposited at coinbase yet. Assuming those pending tx are bank tx and not BTC tx, they can probably still be canceled. Anyway, your friend should contact coinbase asap and see what is happening. Let us know how everything goes.

Hello I would like to join the campaign

Btctalk name: patt0
Rank: Legendary
Current post count: 2485 (including this one)
BTC Address: 13oqQh8UaxCfYWwfwPG2UmX5NjSRp7TBig


Already using sig and avatar.
Thanks

Since this measure might be just temporary I will still leave my application in this thread for your consideration.
I'm already using sig and avatar, so please let me know if I'm rejected regardless of more funds being added up to the campaign or not.
Thank you.

Bitcointalk Username: patt0
Bitcointalk Rank: Legendary
Number of Posts: 2484 (including this one)
Bitcoin Address: 13oqQh8UaxCfYWwfwPG2UmX5NjSRp7TBig

I have mixed feelings every time I hear about this application. At first this looks like great news for ethereum, because an application was finally created that is getting adopted all over the world. I know we already had etherdelta, but that was an exchange, so it's still tied to the speculative financial market. CryptoKitties is just a game, that is also tied to speculation, since it's objective is to create and collect rare kitties, but it is still a game.
This just proves the point that ethereum dapps, have a real use case application, and we will probably see more collectible games coming up, or other types of applications that could benefit from a decentralized network.

The problem is, that this small game also showed us, how fragile ethereum still is when it comes to scalability. How can we expect global adoption of ethereum, and a large number of successful dapps running on the network, if we can't even handle one. I know these issues affect most crypto, including bitcoin, but lets not forget that BTC is now more tied to gold and to being an asset, so even being at max capacity, it can still handle things for now. Ethereum, on the other hand, really needs to solve this issues fast, otherwise it wont be able to handle dapps or even ICO funding.

Recently read that article at coindesk and it definitely gave me a good laugh. Not about the article of course, but about the irony in it. It must be hard for Jamie to be taking all that, and no wonder we are seeing him very quiet right now.
For me this only proves, that most people still don't really know what they are talking about when it comes to bitcoin. You can't simply just change your mind like that, assuming you made a good research in the first place. So either he didn't, and he just took the safe approach that is to reject what you don't understand, or he really did tried to manipulate the market with his influence in order to buy cheap bitcoin. Either way, this looks really bad for the CEO of a big bank like JPMorgan.

No wonder we need bitcoin, in order to take back the control over our money, and don't leave it in the hands do kids like Jamie Dimon, that either talk without doing research, or just tries to manipulate us.

I'm sure that making bitcoin more private is probably on the Core dev team agenda, but I doubt that is something that has a high priority level. Bitcoin is somewhat anonymous, since your identity is not tied to your wallet or address, but of course we all know that everything is public in the blockchain, so by the time someone knows you are the owner of an address, they can track down every transaction you make. They won't know what they are, unless they also manage "to ID" the other addresses, but they can see how much you have there, and how much you have been spending.

You can of course keep changing addresses, and do your best not to get identified by a particular address, so I'm not really worried with this. As far as the IRS goes, don't forget that regulation is important for bitcoin, in order for it to become legit and get more adoption. I have no plans in evading taxes, and I don't think anyone should do that.

Anonymity is important, but I hope the Core team is focused on the scalability issues, and in developing off-chain solutions like the lightning network. That is the very important update that we are all waiting. Anyway since segwit provides many off-chain solutions, I'm sure that it will be easy to increase the privacy of bitcoin transactions.

Hello, I would like to join this campaign if a spot is still available (I see a ban in the spreadsheet, but I don't know if that spot is now open or not).
Already using signature. Thank you.

Link to Profile: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=205369
Bitcointalk Rank: Legendary
Current number of posts: 2480 (including this one)
Bitcoin Address to send the payment: 13oqQh8UaxCfYWwfwPG2UmX5NjSRp7TBig

Most of the "bad" reviews I get on IOTA are normally related to their dev team, and in my opinion a coin is only as valuable as the dev team behind it. I don't want to raise any FUD here, and the only thing I heard about IOTA was the problem they faced when their team tried to implement their own hash function, and if it wasn't for another developer, outside the team, to show them a flaw in their code, it would be possible for an attacker to forge a user’s digital signature and use it to steal funds. This was corrected but it still raises the alarm when dealing with IOTA.

I like the coin, and they will probably grow even bigger, as soon as trust in their dev team is completely reinstalled.

I would say it can do both things, depending on either we are dealing with legit ICOs or scam ICOs. Let's not forget ICOs are more connected to Ethereum than to Bitcoin, but I guess BTC is still the main gate to enter into other cryptos, even though we have Ether listed in coinbase, and people can buy ehter directly if they want. Anyway, ICOs, are definitely a good to get more money into crypto, because depending on their funding methods, they usually accept bitcoin and ether for their funding. This means that more people will buy these coins, in order to fund ICOs, if they prove to be good investments.

Of course if instead of good ICOs we get scams, it will bring lack of confidence into crypo, and keep investors away. The scammers will most likely sell the funds they raised back into fiat as soon as possible, because their address could be easily locked out from major exchanges, and it would be harder for them to spend the stolen money.

Right now I don't think bitcoin, or any crypto for that matter, are any threats to fiat. Bitcoin has a very small market cap, so it can't really be compared to fiat currencies. I think fiat will always exist, but I do understand that if bitcoin gets larger, it could pose a threat to fiat. Gold itself could be a huge threat to fiat, if it was easy to spend. Gold is also decentralized so it's not influenced by the economy of any particular country, and this is the main reason why we see people buying gold as a safe haven, specially in time o crisis. So we know that every time fiat tends to decline, gold normally increases.

Since bitcoin has the same concept of gold, but it solved most of its "flaws" (it's easier to store, it can be easily be "broken" in smaller pieces, it's easier to carry, etc.), it could actually become a convenient way to perform payments as well. So if Bitcoin ends up being regulated and accepted, I'm sure people will return to it at a much larger scale than they return to gold, and we will see fiat losing value.

Hi there, when finally saw the potencial in crypto I started to hold my coins, and I was very reluctant to trade or even spend my coins, because I realized how much money I was losing over time. I know avoid spending as much as possible, but I decided to allocate a very small amount to trade. I see it as a game, and I want to see how far I can go.

I don't have a good trading background, and I only did sports trading when I bet at Betfair, and I am now applying the same basic concepts in crypto trading. I'm scalping the market trying to explore the big variations in price. I'm only trying to gain around 1% a day, and I always use my entire stake. I started with $170, that is of course a very small amount.

So my question is, when will it get hard to do what I do?
With $170 it's really easy to get my stack matched, and with the price variations I have no problem getting 1% daily profit out of my trades. I started 4 days ago and I now have $180.

If I keep this up I would be doing 30% a month, and that is huge, according to what I read from other traders, so does this mean that if I try to do these trades with higher amounts of money it will get harder? If so, why is that? Is it because my stacks will not get matched so easily, and I will need to be exposed more time, and won't get my trades finished in just one day?

I'm not sure about that. Ripple is trying to establish itself in the banking sector but it is not alone on that race. Stellar Lumens is "backed" by IBM and has the same potencial. You can say the same about IOTA, and I heard they have a partnership with Microsoft. Although they are more tied to the micro-payments market they could probably compete with Stellar and Ripple as well. I still hasn't read many things about Cardano, but maybe they are a similar coin. So I can't really say that ripple will be the chosen technology for the banking sector, because there are plenty of strong options out there.