I definitely don't think 15% is enough of your money invested into Crypto, but that is coming from someone that has been routinely screwed over by banks through fees, fraud and other nonsense that puts me at a net-loss with anything fiat; my stock portfolios and investments barely keep up with inflation if they even manage to do that, which is honestly quite rare. Bitcoin has been the only investment that I've ever seen to consistency have spectacular returns even during some of the toughest times for any given country/government/currency at any given time. I have legitimately 80% of my entire worth in Crypto, and It has been that way for years; I've never had a second thought, I've never looked back and I don't plan on changing things anytime soon.

If anything my 80% still might not be enough, I'm thinking about picnicking up a 3rd job just to directly deposit into an exchange to purchase bitcoin with. I'm living like a bitcoin slave now so I can live like a bitcoin king later. I'm sure we all agree, we should've done the same a long time ago, we'd all be better off and I'd bet my life that bitcoin is going to repeat this pattern until it breaks the glass ceiling and shows us how impressive the future can really be.

These things are bound to happen when there is so much money involved; there are going to be companies that don't take it seriously enough to protect themselves minimally. There are going to be companies that do take it seriously but still cannot manage to protect themselves from malicious intent. Security and billions of dollars becomes a complicated dance to perform without someone slipping and failing. It's not possible for every business to succeed, and it's not going to be the case that every business which fails is simply due to a bad product, many of these businesses are just going to be the victim of Darwinism and hackers are going to suck them dry right out of the game.

Security and hackers are constantly evolving techniques, strategies, trying to outdo one another and it will not always be the case that security wins that battle. It's only naturally that if you have something worth having, someone is going to try to take it from you and if you're not ready to protect it from them, then it's no longer yours. Keep yourself safe, keep your coins quiet, remain a small fish in a big pond and you will never get caught; don't trust exchanges, mining websites, web-wallets or another person when there's anything you're unwilling to lose is at stake.

Fees are not determined by the wallet, unless you are using some strange off-market wallet that none of us tend to use. The fees are determined by the amount of inputs your transaction has, and the amount of received-transactions that constitute the amount you're trying to send is what is called thee inputs. These inputs add Size to your transaction, and you pay a transaction fee based on size, Satoshi per Byte. Each input adds something like 180-Bytes if I'm not mistaken onto your transaction; I was sending transaction fees of 175 Satoshi per Byte and getting my transactions confirmed almost immediately even at the height of the congestion a few days ago.

Your 10-15 USD may be difficult to send because of the manner in which you have received it, also with the price of a single Satoshi being so "high" right now, it causes ever input towards your transaction to be extraordinarily costly. It's easier to not think about Bitcoin in terms of USD in my opinion, if you think about the fees in this way you'll never send any coin and may miss out on some opportunities, because you're irrationally upset about things you should already understand.

No wallet can "take less fees" and give you any better outcome, this is determined by miners and the network itself. The wallet is just the customer representative you're choosing to be upset with today. I say hold your coin until it is worth it to move around or eat your losses and get out of the game before the fees are even more USD.  

Man, it's things like this that people like to pretend don't happen that often.. Even though Equifax leaked half of america's information because financial institutions don't know how to properly handle sensitive information. You cannot trust anybody with your information, and so it's a shame when identity theft is a part of nearly everyone's life at some point.

Whenever you want to move around a significant amount of money there is always a 3-5 day wait at the minimum, banks are not even as quick as bitcoin on its slowest and most congested days. Bitcoin still charges less fees than the banks, and at least bitcoin is honest about what fees will be charged and where the money is going.

Even when the bank knows it is their mistake, where the wrongfully charge you a fee or transfer money incorrect they still force you to wait 3-5 days while the put money back into your account that they never should've taken or touched to begin with. These sorts of waits, fees and problems will dissipate with the banking institutions that are becoming antiques as bitcoin gains more traction. The issues are glaring and becoming more and more of an elephant in the room. Nobody likes to deal with these waits that bitcoin does away with, and I never even thought about the wire and transfer fees as a positive of bitcoin even after all these years of using it.

This is a very expensive lesson to be learned as soon as possible when you want to get involved with bitcoin; if you are somebody that cannot stomach knowing that the price is very mobile and constantly going up and down (more up than down, though) then maybe holding coin isn't for you, but I promise you're going to miss out; the best thing to do is to just learn your lesson, don't make the same mistake and more importantly do not make another mistake trying to do something "clever" to "fix" your mistake. You will end up learning another important and expensive lesson about mixing finances and emotions.

I've learned a few million dollar lessons in my life and most of them have come from bitcoin, long story short, hold onto your coins and ignore everything that you hear when it comes to panicky people making frantic decisions.

Did you end up selling all your coin at $16,000 or so and now you're freaking out about $20,000? I've had those days, they will come and go, just ante-up and get back in there before you regret letting it beat you out of the game!

The trouble I'm seeing with this article is that it's talking about transaction fees increasing in ($).. I have yet to see anything in this article suggesting that the Satoshi/Byte ratio has been increasing and this is what is relevant when discussing the price of transaction fees. If you are complaining simply that the X-Satoshi per Byte that you pay is worth more, this is the equivalent to complaining that bitcoin has increased in price. This article is essentially saying "The Price of Bitcoins triples every 3-months and so there's a lot of transactions on the network."

If this article is correct then 3-months ago the transaction fee should've been 50-Satoshi/Byte and this just isn't the case, and 3-months before that it certainly wasn't 15-Satoshi/Byte. The arguments that this article is attempting to make are null when they aren't even beginning with a proper premise. Am I missing something or wouldn't Satoshi/Byte be a much better indicator of transaction fees than $/transaction ?

Awhile back I did some math with some friends and comparing bitcoin to gold we thought that bitcoin could get to about $350,000 per coin without any exaggeration in price or "over-valuation". A lot of the time "experts" just use some sort of simple algorithm or past-performance to make guesstimates and speculate about the possibilities of bitcoin. The honest answer is that nobody knows because this is a new frontier it is impossible to map the territory before we've even been there.

There is no way to tell how mountainous a territory is prior to seeing it; there is no way to know what is on the other side of the future and the same goes for bitcoin. It could drop to $1, it could sprint up to $100,000 real unexpectedly on us. The people who said bitcoin was going to be worth $20,000 back in 2011 were told they were dreamers, and everyone who claimed that there was a bubble to pop ate their words time and time again.

Your post mostly seems like just wildly throwing around numbers, what you want to do is try to pin down a few reasons why it would rise, fall and stay at those numbers and then adjust your logic depending upon if you're right

Your question is too vague and non-descriptive, there are many coins with different intentions, ownership, niches, etc. There are some coins like bitcoin which have no "ownership" as far as a company owning the development, distribution and production of the coin. There are other coins that were developed specifically by companies to do very specific things, such as Dash which was developed specifically for quick transactions..

There are many coins which are simply ponzi-schemes that some company thought would be a worthwhile payday. We call these pump and dumps, but if you actually pay attention to what a coin is offering, why a company is developing what they're developing and how they plan to maintain and scale themselves up for mass adoption then you'll be able to pick and choose the coins that have some longevity and integrity behind them. The coins that are empathetic to the consumer/user needs/desires are going to be the coins that survive long-term in the cryptocurrency industry.

I'm with some others in the thread in that I question the validity of these claims and statistics, do you have any sources for this material or is it just something you've heard? Although I have heard that an extremely large number of early bitcoins mined and addressees used were not taken very good care of and got lost in the abyss. Many were lost during tests of security, integrity and many were lost to just plain carelessness.

When you say "FBI" are you talking about the individuals that make up the FBI or do you mean the government entity itself has an address or multiple addresses under it's control? If this is the case do you happen to know why that is? Are they simply interested in the technology, or do they have motives beyond that?

I'm also going to assume when you say "never been used" you are referring to have never been moved since being mined, or am I naive to think that is the criteria? Please explain if i am mistaken, because I believe that whatever definition is labeled on "never being used" could simply be explained by "HODL"ers or something similar that just happens to be very prevalent among our community.

Last thing, does "top 1000" addresses mean the address with the highest amount of bitcoin going in/out within a given period, or does it just mean the addresses with the highest quantity of bitcoin in them currently? I'm just trying to get a more firm grasp on what you are presenting here, and it's really difficult without a citation, sources or some explanation/definition of these terms... I may be ignorant, so let me know if I've missed the memo where these were defined officially. Without that though it reallly is hard to do any sort of analyses or conversation on this, so unless you're just trying to spout off random facts then clue me in, please!

"Bubble Bubble Bubble" is all we hear when bitcoin's price hops up, but what you'll notice is that every time bitcoin comes down even a little bit, what you'll notice if you pay attention to the charts is that it catches itself at a nice round number, like $19,000 , $18,500, etc. This is what most traders call a "support" and this normally happens because some whale (someone with a lot of coin) wants to make sure it's specifically not a bubble so they sell of X amount of coin to make sure there is a Support (Group of buyers) that will catch bitcoin and hold it at least at Y price. I thought people only referred to bitcoin as a tulip ironically, not genuinely; have you not been watching the price over the past few years? There has literally never been a bad time to invest and you would be being disingenuous or at least ignorant to pretend like this hasn't been the pattern and the same old story for bitcoin. This is nothing new, and it has never crashed before. You are sounding the alarm, while the rest of us are walking around as usual, acting as if nothing new has happened, because nothing new has happened; we are all impressed with the new heights of bitcoin recently, but it was not a major surprise and it did not come out of the blue.

If people were unwilling to pay the transaction fees the transaction backlog and transaction fees would dry up extremely quickly. The fees operate on supply and demand, the more transactions there are normally means people get antsy about moving their coins and start congesting the network with high fee transactions so that they will go through first. I would be willing to say that there is no (or next to none) correlation between transaction fees and a decrease in bitcoin price. It's not as though these transaction fees are arbitrarily imposed upon each transaction; it very much operates on supply and demand, and right now there is a high demand for bitcoin transaction, which means higher fees, not lower price. In my opinion you're trying to connect two dots on different pages, they just don't go together. At best, high-volume of transactions and high transactions fees would correlate with price drops about 50% of the time; because if you simplify price jumps and falls pretty rigidly it could be either dumps or pumps.

I'm sure there are some back-alley personalities around here that have some thrilling stories about earning bitcoin in ridiculous ways, so it really gives me pause to even explain any of my methods/stories in a thread and label it the "craziest" things I've ever done in this respect. I remember a couple years ago selling my Xbox, laptop, games and some other electronics I had lying around for bitcoin; I can't say that it's too crazy, but it certainly makes it crazy when you sold an Xbox for over $5,000 (y'know, cause bitcoin is soaring). I used to mine bitcoins on my crappy laptop without a GPU, some of you may find that pretty crazy  

I'm honestly embarrassed at how boring my methods of earning bitcoin have been, it almost makes me feel obligated to launch a service, game or something to contribute a little more heavily... What makes this thread kind of sad though honestly, is that the people with the craziest stories will opt-out naturally, because it's most likely those with the craziest stories that are unable to share their stories.  

I don't know how many times it needs to be explained to "skeptics" of bitcoin's rise in price that it's not a "bubble" because there is no excessive value being placed on bitcoin artificially or in anyway that would create a burstable "bubble"; this is simply a value realization, which is to say that I do not see bitcoin going down very far, if at all, it very probably will continue to rise and leave people behind. Hindsight will hit these people very hard and they'll unfortunately miss the mass adoption spikes we've been talking about for years.

I have 4-5 old iPhones with cracked screens that work perfectly, I have an iPod Touch that I wouldn't mind parting with either. I have a stack of old desktop computers, a couple of laptops and everything still works just fine; I just get newer generations/versions and then store my old one away. I would love to liquidate for some more bitcoin, though so I'm wondering if you're interested in any of these types of things?

I can get you exact models of each if you are interested, that way you can better determine which price you would be happy to pay and we'll see if we can come to some sort of agreement. I'm pretty reasonable, so as long as you make me a good deal I'll almost definitely take you up on it; I understand you're trying to make a profit as well.

I have an Xbox One with a bunch of games that I'll take an offer for as well! I even have an old-school Zune if that's something that interests you. I also have controllers, headsets, computer monitors, a small television. The items are located in America, let me know if you're interested in negotiating further!

If I'm being honest, I really am not "surprised" as much as I am excited, relieved and feeling determined as ever knowing that we are on path to what has been envisioned since the beginning of bitcoin. I do hope that traders lighten their load on the blockchain, or something could happen within development I suppose, so that Satoshi's original idea of Casual transactions can again take place. We are sort of in a run-away phase right now where people are hyperactive and overly excited. It's best to just hold out hats for now and not count any chickens before they hatch!

I expected bitcoin to explode, then explode again, and again until it's finally got the market-cap, transactions and value that it has the potential to reach. I have no "expected" rate for bitcoin, because it's a volatile creature, all I know is that it comes in spikes and waves. It has the best upward trend I've ever seen, but it's significant movement normally happens within moments and it is certainly powerful. I just stand out of the way and let it do it's thing, i don't want to put any chains on bitcoin by expecting it to do anything; I'm just happy we let it out of it's cage to see what it is capable of.

Whenever I see things like this I just assume they are planning an exit scam of some sort, however it certainly is possible that something like this happens; in any case you are most likely best off by trying too compound your coin with your own hands. It is extremely tough, near impossible, to find someone that will auto-pilot your money into more money long-term with consistency. If all you do is hold onto your coin, the daily interest just off the price spikes is enough to be very happy with; where as the coin you could potentially lose to an exit-scam (or a hack for the matter) done by (or to) some seemingly reputable company that has been operating for a year or more would be devastating and nullifying.

My vote is to stay away, hold onto your coins under exclusively your own control and if you feel like you'd like to earn coin from your coin look into trading on an exchange or when the dust settles on the price of bitcoin you can consider lending with collateral to members on this forum.

This guy seems to pretty much have covered all the bases on this one; but I would just like to add something that I was unaware of until recently. Another legendary member around here explained to me that the size(Bytes) of your transaction is not dependent on the amount of bitcoin; the size of the transaction is determined by the amount of inputs the transaction you're attempting to send has.

Inputs are determined by how many transactions you received to accumulate the amount you are trying to send. For example, if you are trying to send .01 and you received ten transactions of .001 to acquire this sum you will have ten inputs for this transaction; In contrast if you are trying to send that same .01, but received it in 1-transaction as opposed to 10, the transaction fee will be 10-times less. Each input generally adds about 180-bytes onto the transaction size (I think?)

As the guy above said, transaction size is what determines the fee, you can do so on the sites they provided; I sent a transaction the other night with a fee of 111.5 Satoshi per Byte, and a transaction with a fee of 175 Satoshi per Byte simultaneously and one took 3-days while the other took 3-minutes.

The reasons these are bought are a multitude; some people honestly don't know much about bitcoin at all and may think all miners are created equal. They may think that a miner is a miner and think no further; some people buy these strictly so they have the "bragging rights", if you can imagine... The most reasonable reason, in my opinion, that people acquire USB miners is to experience mining and get a feel for the process while they decide whether or not to invest into a larger miner.

As with anything people buy it for different reasons, but honestly the biggest chunk of that market is probably people not understanding what they are buying, believing they will reap more of a reward than reality; this probably scares away many people from investing into mining, because they figure if it isn't profitable or worth-while on a small-scale, then they are doubtful of the large-scale operation/investment.

Our species, and those like us are not a conservative group. We are wasteful, we are destructive, we are hungry and want to take whatever we can, as much of it as possible, all at once. We have a greedy nature and we can't help but be over-indulgent and "ambitious". We may be using more than we should or "need" to, but does that define "waste"? We are investing into the future and innovation, investment is only possibly with excess and with excess comes waste. I'd argue that wasting resources for digital currencies is still a net-positive compared to the alternative of the same old system forever.

We are wasting resources everyday in various areas, programs and inventions because that's what it takes to invest in the future. It hurts to think about our waste when it is quantified in terms we can understand, in terms of how many people could have been supplied X for Y days, instead of this. The question must always be "Is it worth it?" It is a tough question, but if our excess were not spent as we choose then our situation would be unsustainable and without progress. This represents our freedom, basic freedom to do as you wish with what is yours. One man's waste is another man's future.

Simple Answer : No.

There are totalitarian regimes all throughout the world that would not allow their people to operate with any currency or consent to any trade that they themselves can not tax, tariff or forbid. As long human nature remains the same and there are people mad-hungry for power these sorts of governments, totalitarian regimes and feigned democracies will exist and they will continue to limit the access and power of those beneath them. Some will see bitcoin as a threat and suppress it to the best of their ability.

I do not see North Korean citizens having bitcoin anytime soon, please correct me if I have misspoken, but it seems that only developed/developing countries will even attempt to legislate anything to do with bitcoin. There will never, in my opinion, be a day where bitcoin is legal world-wide universally; just as I don't believe there can ever be world peace.. There are powerful and conflicting ideas and narratives at play.