I found computer illiterate members of the older generation of pensioners haven't heard about Bitcoin. The ones who refuse to go near a computer don't understand the concept when you try explaining it to them. They stop you half way through your explanation, ask "is it something to do with computers", then refuse to listen to any more of your explanation.

It costs between $150 and $500 a night to stay at one of the London Hiltons. That leaves a remainder of more than $10k to explain. Did he fly there and back by a personally chartered private jet for his exclusive use? I bet you could afford one of those for less than 10k. Politicians are always getting caught fiddling their expenses, and the Bitcoin Foundation seems to have taken a leaf out of their book.

I hope they all get their money back, but I'm skeptical international investors will get much, if anything back.

The Mississippi Power Company is owed money and has won a court judgment, but it's still struggling to get its money back. Small investors don't have armies of lawyers like the Mississippi Power Company, and international small investors might have less legal rights than American citizens.

I never found out how much Garza made from his scheme until now. It says he made $19 million from the whole thing including his coin. I hope the investors get all their money back. The way he conducted business fits the model of a Ponzi scheme. I remember he said his coin was guaranteed a value of $20, then denied he ever said it after it started crashing.

http://www.coindesk.com/gaw-faces-ponzi-scheme-charges-from-sec/

Didn't the Bitcoin Foundation used to pay the core devs? Who pays them now most of the Bitcoin Foundation's executives are in jail, and the organisation isn't making money anymore? I know some devs will work for nothing, but I should have thought the top ones want paying a good wage.

I think they are out to screw as much money out of the market as possible by pumping and dumping. They don't care if it's going to the moon, or if it will die. They don't care if their pumps and dumps eventually kill it, they only want as much short term profit as they can screw out of the market by manipulating all the little fish.

Suppose someone bought a gun with a stolen credit card before the credit card owner realized it had been stolen. How could a gun shop refuse that stolen credit card before it had been reported stolen? The shop could do a check on the card to ascertain if it's reported stolen, but if the check came up clean how could the shop know it's stolen?

If it was accompanied with fake ID the shop would sell without a shadow of a doubt. Try buying a gun with Bitcoin in that shop and you would ge refused. Freshly stolen credit cards would be useful for buying uns from brick and mortar shops, not Bitcoin.

If our kids will not know what money is why are they introducing plastic bank notes? Most countries are planning to introduce them over the next few years because they last longer than paper money. Why put all that effort into designing and introducing them into circulation if all governments intend to get rid of paper money completely?

No, it would be horrible for all the mugs who got dumped on. The only person it would be super for is the organizer. Most of the people who joined in on Wolong's pumps were scammed when he dumped on them.

Wolong did that to Dogecoin and other alts. He made a fortune pumping the price and dumping on his co-conspirators. He never tried the same stunt with Bitcoin because it costs too much money to manipulate Bitcoin's price. Five million dollars spread across all the exchanges that matter isn't enough tp pump Bitcoin.

I couldn't find any promotions except from some online casinos which are offering "free Bitcoins" for Halloween, but you probably have to deposit more than they give you, and spend your "free Bitcoins" on betting games. There's got to be other catches like you can't withdraw small amounts, and what they give you is below the withdrawal limit.

I started tracing those Bitcoins but they have probably been sent through a mixer because they get split up and sent to loads of different addresses. The blackmailer will probably take a trip out of Russia and swap them for fiat at a foreign ATM if he's really from Russia. There are no questions asked Russian hosting services that people from all over the world use, so the blackmailer could be from anywhere and using A Russian service to host his extortion bot.

They were researching ripple and considering starting their own blockchain based on its technology, but it's centralized. If the server, or set of servers running it go down then the entire network goes offline. A government, hackers, or the banks themselves could switch off the network by going after the servers.

The Bitcoin network never goes offline, you can always access your money stored in it. Sometimes the bank's debit card network goes offline. If they had their own blockchain that wouldn't be reliable all the time either.

According to cryptocoinsnews any post by a woman here is instantly replied to with a barrage of sexist abuse. Cryptocoinsnews adds that the bitcoin community is 95% male.

I have seen posts by women here that were treated no worse than the posts made by men, and I have never witnessed barrages of sexist abuse at any posts made by women. In fact I found women tend to be treated with more respect than men on bitcointalk. I don't know how the researcher cryptocoinsnews quoted worked out that only 5% of the bitcoin community are women, I don't think it's possible to work out the true figure. This thread still hasn't conclusively proved any figures yet.

https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/bitcoiners-sexism/

That Coindesk story says Gemini will need to pass subsequent approvals before it can serve US customers. Exactly what extra approvals will it have to pass, and how long will they be expected to take? Until they can serve US customers they won't start serving foreign customers. I thought Gemini would have been open months ago, and it's so long since the last time I heard anything about it that I'd given up looking for stories about it.

The Coinmarketcap Bitcoin markets page has a special category at the bottom of the page for markets with no trading fees. Any of those markets are denoted with * to signify "Volume Excluded - No Trading Fees". The OkCoin Intl.   BTC/USD market has fees and is included in Coinmarketcap's volume calculations. The OKCoin.cn   BTC/CNY market has no fees, and is excluded. Its volume is more than ten times higher than the market with fees today.

OkCoin Intl.   BTC/USD   $ 1,341,280   
OKCoin.cn   BTC/CNY   $ 25,663,300 *

http://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/#markets

Any markets without fees are a joke for calculating volume from, and thankfully Coinmarketcap ignores them all.

I haven't logged into my Bitstamp account for ages. I'll have to log in and find out if I've been given any free fee credits. They occasionally have a month with no trading fees. Free fee credits might be a cheaper way of tempting people to trade there. I don't think ordinary traders using bots is fake trading but if an exchange with fees uses its own bots to make trades without paying any fees, then it's fake trading to make it appear that exchange's volume is higher than it actually is.

The latest information I heard was Karples has been charged with embezzlement, but has the option of petitioning the court for release pending trial. Trials can take months before they start and be held up for innumerable reasons. It might still be ongoing this time next year if Karples defense gets the trial adjourned enough times. If he gets found guilty they will probably appeal the decision too so the end of the trial might not be the conclusion of the whole affair.

It's quite a coincidence they decided to cut costs by sacking most of their staff straight after news of the hack got out. They must know they will lose business because some merchants will lose their trust in Bitpay. Its reputation has been damaged so badly I wonder if it can survive in the long term. According to coindesk the average daily volume of Bitpay was $435,000 in 2014. However, I can't find any information on what the average daily volume of Bitpay was in 2015, but they must still have been generating some volume before the hack was exposed.

http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-on-the-dark-web-the-facts/

I noticed there are lots of little trades backwards and forwards for small amounts like 0.05 BTC on Bitstamp. They can be bought and sold back again in the space of minutes. It often looks like the work of bots to me, and I often wonder if Bitstamp themselves control the bots. 0.05 BTC is only worth $12, and I doubt their are hundreds of traders all furiously trading such small amounts. I suspect most exchanges use bots to inflate their daily volume.