Big leg up right now, we can be on $7000 at this pace pretty soon. The ETF news are definitely very bullish. At some point they stopped being effective because all of these "wow, an ETF is coming" news always got shut down by the SEC, but the SEC right now seems to be seeking to get it done for real this time. Im looking forward to see the price skyrocket with an ETF in the market for all the computer illiterates to get some exposure to Bitcoin, I can see new ATH's pretty easily.

As of for now, we need to get past $10k, and go from there.

Ethereum has a big single point of failure called Vitalik Buterin. It's also not even decentralized. The mining is even worse than Bitcoin, and the nodes is definitely WORSE than Bitcoin at such insane level of growth rate.





There was never an alignment to fork. The fact that Ethereum Classic was created and still exists shows that it was a failed hardfork. A successful fork doesn't generate an altcoin, if there is consensus the legacy chain dies.

Vitalik and friends lost a lot of money and they recovered it via hardfork. Ethereum is a joke. No "code is law", not a safe store of value, doesn't even scale to be an usable token for common payments. I still don't see why ETH is worth what it is other than it's ability to generate ICO's and Vitalik having big connections like Putin, certain banking groups etc, to keep it in the news.

This isn't even the main problem. Im not sure if you should declare it as income tax or as you say, 0 cost basis investment, of course you will always pay some tax in any case, the main problem is if you did not keep track record to prove where your bitcoins come from, they could simply claim that the origin could be from drug dealing or some criminal activity, note the "could". You can't prove it, they can't prove it, there is a conflict there. This situation varies a lot depending jurisdiction. Is this grey area that scares me the most. Worst case scenario and you will lose your coins as they confiscate them due "Illegal assets" or something.

For instance, many exchanges are now dead and people have lost tons of track records, or even current exchanges have extremely poor policies in trackrecord keeping, for instance Livecoin is an absolute mess which keeps only the last 30 days of trades, so I have lost some trading records there... honestly it is a nightmare trying to keep track of everything. Now if you try to sell some of these coins involved in lost records you may have problems. Like I said, a total nightmare.

I have heard sound arguments from both sides, but my conclusion is that it is only positive and strengthens the network to have as many nodes as possible assuming said nodes are ran by independent parties, not ran in bulk by the same party, as this creates a single point of failure. The more individual parties owning copies of the blockchain and being able to audit it the better, you don't want only a couple of corporations owning the blockchain, what would be the point then?

We may see this in action in September, with the so called BCH Stress Test, so pay attention to that, and we may learn a lot of things. Im going to be following BitPico's effort to collapse BCH's network, let's see how they manage with very few nodes.

But some people said it's treated as income tax, so you should be paying taxes yearly, in some countries monthly or every quarter, it depends. You should also be telling the government that "I own X amount of BTC" even if you have it in your wallet.

Of course, no one does this. I would pay any taxes needed because I need to eventually buy property and all of my BTC are of legal origin (I didn't do illegal stuff to own it). The problem is, just like many other, we are paranoid that for example in relation to the signature campaign issue, maybe having some screenshots of the thread with your address in there and so on, it's not enough, maybe they come up with excuses to steal your hard earned coins. Or maybe eventually they deem it illegal and then you are screwed. Do you really want that?

I want a guarantee that my government is not going to screw me up while im trying to "do the right thing", and so far there's none, you need precedents. For example OP says he is from spain, so he needs to know some precedents of people that has earned BTC from sig campaigns and cashed out in that jurisdiction, to know what to expect. Until you haven't heard of precedents I wouldn't risk it and just hodl, which is the only guaranteed place where your money will be safe. When you have more info, assess the situation later.

The only reason these smaller places exist is to bypass unfair things in huge states. Perhaps someone finds that their local tax requirements are insanely high and it's ruining their wealth, these small jurisdictions will always find profit in filling that need.

Same goes for prohibitive requirements to be "qualified investors" in order to invest (for example ICOs)

Im not sure to what extent big nations can push small jurisdictions to follow their orders, but it's possible big governments don't and will never do nothing about the so called tax havens because the government itself is profiting from them. Just look at Trump, he is known for avoiding taxes and he is now the president. Im sure all of them have off-shore accounts while they punish their citizens with high taxes, when (in an ideal world) these with insane amounts of money should be helping paying the most. Of course as long as an ideal world doesn't exist, these places will exist, just like governments with insane taxes will also exist.

I would like to trusth mnemonic phrases because it's really convenient to be able to keep your entire Bitcoin wealth in your head by memorizing 12 words, but im still too paranoid to move my cold storage into an Electrum wallet, even after taking all reasonable security measures like doing it in an airgapped computer and so on.

My main worry is key derivation. Someone with the right info could cause wreck you due possible derivation of the seed. Anyone knows what are the exploitable attacks and dangers of mnemonic phrases vs just keeping your good ol wallet.dat in an airgapped computer?

The problem is, if in the future your government decides possession of Bitcoin is strictly illegal, then you are screwed big time because they already know you own X BTC.

If you have been making small amounts of money monthly worth of signature campaign for years for example, it's not an illegal activity, you earned it, you just didn't declare it, so if you ever want to buy property with your BTC (which would be worth x100 times more across years) you just would need to show proof of your sig campaign payments (how? im not sure... screenshots of the payments?? how does this even work), and maybe pay an extra fee for not having paid taxes on time, but this fee may be worth it since you are protecting yourself from a possible ban-on-possession of your government. This would give you a window of opportunity to move into a jurisdiction happy to take your BTC taxes instead of confiscating them as illegal assets (which they would, because you told them you own them). Think long term.

Governments most likely don't care as long as you aren't dealing with fiat.

For instance, was the "DAO hack" legal? It was just the code itself, exploited, but if "code is law" applies then it was not a crime from a strict crypto perspective. What if the government made a law saying exploiting smart contracts was a crime while "code is law" is supposed to be the case?

What's clear is these funds were bailed out and for me when that happened the whole dream of "smart contracts" collapsed, it's really nonsense. You either get hardforks to recover money (so code is not law) or you get in legal trouble because of governments making laws about outcome of smart contracts.

Only the protocol itself can ultimately protect your tokens and Bitcoin seems to be the only safe place to hold said tokens, adding complex smart contracts will only increase risk.

Not all investments are risky, it just depends on the risk:reward ratio to evaluate if it's worth it and it depends on one's personal situation.

With real state, even if prices plummet, worst case scenario you can at least live in it, and should be able to rent it nonetheless, even if for cheaper.

Also there are other investments beside real estate.

But risk:reward I think Bitcoin is the place to be by a mile for anyone that lives with their parents and doesn't have to pay any bills. Just hold it 10 years and you may retire, none of the other less radical investments have that kind of reward in 10 years time. With 1 BTC you could be set, there is no other investment for an entry point of (currently $6,500) that could retire you in a decade.

Hashing a file and putting it on the blockchain is as far as it's going to get to "store files on the blockchain". The actual files will never be able to be held in a blockchain. Blockchain space is a scarce resource, we have already problems fitting in transactions, imagine if people start uploading GB's worth of crap.

There was a project called freenet that attempted a decentralized network to store files there, im not sure if it died or not but that may make more sense that using a blockchain.

I recently found this website:

https://coinatmradar.com/

Apparently there are more than 3400 ATMs across the globe and it's growing at an exponential rate:

https://coinatmradar.com/charts/#growth

On this website you can easily find an ATM near you, I had an idea like this myself for a website but it seems someone was faster than me. There is ad space there, I would consider it if I wanted to promote something, the website it's pretty cool, good design, excellent ranking in google, SEO wise it's a good deal.

Blockchain.info sucks, also your private keys should be considered already compromised because they weren't created in an airgapped, cold storaged environment. You have enough BTC to start putting more time and resources into security. The more BTC you have the more time and resources you should allocate into protecting them. Electrum is still not safe if your computer is going to have an ethernet card installed. So what you need to do is create new private addresses in a cold storage environment and then send your coins there with regular transactions, do not import them. Use https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/ to pay as little as possible, 1-2 sats should do for now.

It's most likely because they can't even afford property. Most millennial are stuck in low paying jobs that will simply never allow them to own property, or at least a property that's worth owning in order to rent it, because that is what makes it more interesting than Bitcoin, you can rent it and get some money monthly, and you could also live in it, with Bitcoin you can do nothing but hold it and see how it goes up long term, but has positives like 0 maintenance cost, it takes no physical space etc, so for millennial that live with parents it's an ideal asset in their portfolio. Actually I made a thread about this back then called "Young people should go all in on bitcoin". This was before the 20k run so I hope they did so.

Some people has pointed to how they got away with claiming the bitcoins were mined, but anyone with a brain could be able to look at the transaction that you sent to the exchange and then see if they were freshly generated bitcoins or not, but im not sure if this is the case.

If anyone knows I would like to know, im learning about taxes myself. For example I have no idea how taxes on signature campaign bounties work. Do you have to pay some additional taxes? (income tax) or you can hold it and declare it eventually when you sell for fiat as capital gains? Could you just claim that you mined it? do they actually look at blockchain records? Do you have to present screenshots (??) of the bitcointalk thread? Bounties and bitcoin are a very strange combo and im still yet to know how ti really works in practice.

The dotcom bubble comparative is acceptable due the endless influx of nonsensical altcoins getting millions worth of funding. This is what makes Bitcoin look bad in the eyes of potential serious investors, they see a bunch of trash getting hyped and they think it's all a joke. There is a lot of people out there with a lot of fiat to spend on the latest and greatest, and they get advised to buy some ICO instead of buying Bitcoin. The bubble will keep growing for as long as other's have success stories to talk about. At some point it will collapse and there will be no winners to keep attracting capital. This will be the end of the bubble and we'll have a period of a general consensus of "crypto being dead". At some point, BTC will go up and FOMO will kick in again like never before.

If you want to know what that will look like, look at the Amazon stock in the dotcom burst and look at the current price.

Where were these wallet.dat files sitting? in a CD/DVD, HDD, SSD? did you find them and one of them was corrupt? or did you accidentally delete a wallet.dat? Are you on Linux or Windows? Are they all BTC wallets or some altcoin wallets? (you mention LTC)

If you are on Windows you can use recuva:

https://www.ccleaner.com/recuva

In Linux look one of these:

https://alternativeto.net/software/recuva/?platform=linux

Deleted files are accessible the faster you try to recover them, otherwise if they become overwritten by other files it's over, maybe if you have access to really sophisticated forensics stuff you would still have a chance.

And be sure to know that the wallet.dat you are trying to decrypt corresponds to the software you are using otherwise that's why it may be crashing.

I think they are Russian, at least the guy that used the ")" smile. That smiley face without eyes is (for some probably interesting reason I don't know) only used by Russians, and maybe other eastern European citizens. It's one of these weird internet things, like how Brazilians (and im not sure if Portuguese too) instead of laughing with "haha" spam a bunch of "kkkkkkk". I would do some research on that if I had more free time.

I think these guys should stick to the local section, but I don't personally mind people with broken English posting too, some people have are really smart but can't speak proper English, if they end up typing nonsense just have a laugh and that's about it, I wouldn't mind spending resources banhammering all of that, again, what needs more resources is the account recovery system.

This seems like enough proof to me. Can you sign again another message with the current date?

It would be extremely irritating to see my account being used by someone else to rack up BTC on signature campaigns.


He signed a 2015 one, he obviously needs to get his account back. This forum cannot let this sort of injustice happening, it's really nonsense, considering it takes a minute to reset the password to his requested email. Theymos seriously needs to hire staff to get this done faster or if someone gets rejected, at least explain why and don't let the guy waiting infinitely.

This is an angle in which authorities could find an excuse to make the entire blockchain illegal, this has been considered before as an attack vector or at least a social attack because nobody wants to be involved in such degeneracy.

Unfortunately, there are trolls out there that will keep doing this. Back in the day when transaction fees were extremely cheap, there were trolls out there sending child porn messages embedded in the transaction to public addresses, so when someone looks up your public address they would see that crap. There is nothing we can do about it, other than the fees going high enough to avoid that sort of spam, and it seems it worked because I have not seen too much of that again.