as a rule whenever you hear some country has banned bitcoin your first assumption should  be that the news is false. and it is true in 99% of the cases. the problem is the news sites that we have do not care about honest journalism. I don't think journalism exists among them anymore, they are all money machines that are trying to make the most out of this ecosystem. so what they do is that they continue publishing the most controversial stories to get the most visitors and earn the most from their banner ads and the traffic.
they don't care about the source or even legitimacy of the news. that is why we call them click baits

the biggest problem that we are facing with exchanges is the fact that they either scam you or they get hacked and go bankrupt. they may also say they were hacked but in reality they have scammed you. for example Bittrex which used to be one of the biggest altcoin exchanges scammed thousands of users selectively last year and stole their money.

having higher or lower fees have nothing to do with being safe for trading!

any system, technology, ... will always have certain restrictions and benefits at the same time. as long as the benefits are more than those restrictions we consider that system to be a good one. and restrictions can always be bent. we can work around them and find solutions for them.

in case of blockchain technology you are correct, it has restrictions for scaling but it is a new technology and we are working on it to make it better, more efficient and improve it every day. you will never be able to find a solution that is 100% perfect. you will have to accept the best thing which has the least amount of problems.

there are literary 100 other ways of making a lot more money, with a lot less risk, legally and without tax. whereas when you use bitcoin futures you may need to also manipulate the market which is illegal, you will have to pay a huge tax possibly twice and it has a lot of risk involved.

one of those other ways is to trade shitcoins in short term. for example ETH is one of those shitcoins that gets good pumps sometimes. so if you wanted profit you wait for ETH dump to end and for it to reach its real value which is below $100 and then invest in it and wait for them to pump it and make a ton of money.

the bitcoin "processing speed" is the same as always. it is 1 block every 10 minutes on average or 2016 blocks every 2 weeks which is the difficulty adjustment period. no serious proposal has ever wanted to change this.
scaling is a different argument.


there were a bunch of proposals to increase scaling of bitcoin, not all of them are going to be accepted. some were accepted and adopted by the whole network. it started with Segregated Witness and will be followed by things such as signature aggregation, Shnorr signatures, Second layer solutions, and possibly increasing the block size itself in the future.

saying that upgrades were not implemented is just being short sighted.

you are digging up ancient pointless drama.

it is actually a much harder decision than you think. there is pros and cons in choosing either one! and you can rob both the same with a gun to the merchant's head forcing them to give you their funds.
- bitcoin is more valuable and it is much easier to transfer. the robber can send it out to his address which he has created before and is not carrying the keys. so when running away he doesn't have to carry anything. he goes in, robs, gets out. someone seeing him in the street right after the robbery wouldn't know he just robbed a lot of money!
- cash however is 100% anonymous. there is no way to find the robber if he gets away but he has to carry it out. if someone sees him in the street they will see him carrying a large bag filled with cash

oh, I missed that!

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more than a year ago when price was below $1000 the same situation was going on.
12.5BTC being generated each day which was $1.8 per day. people weren't even imagining that in a year this would rise up to $36 million per day. but it happened.
2 years ago this was not even $1 million per day. and before that it was even lower even though reward was 25BTC per block.
currently the daily trading volume of bitcoin is in billions of dollars per day (between $3-5 billion) so why is it so hard to see price go up 2.5x from the last ATH? we are still far from mass adoption. there is only 1% or less of the whole world who have invested in bitcoin if that number increases to 2% price should go to $50k!

it is mostly digitalization though not just bitcoin. for example when we use our bank cards (debit cards?) instead of cash that is exactly what you mean and it has nothing to do with bitcoin. the problem is people still continue to use cash so it won't solve this unless it is a 100% removal of any usage of cash which is impossible. at least for many years.

as a rule of thumb whenever you see a price difference between two exchanges the reason is because that exchange with the different price (high or low) is cut off from the rest of the market. and that price difference needs to be big, otherwise small differences like 1-5% is normal because of the market fluctuations.

otherwise if there is a big enough difference and that exchange doesn't have any issues or is not cut off people will use arbitrage trading to make profit and bring that price to normal market levels.
for example if price is lower in Zebpay like $5500 an arbitrage trader will buy it on Zebpay and sells it on anywhere else like bitstamp and gets $1000+ profit per coin then repeats this as many times as he can. there are lots of arbitrage traders out there who will do this and price will jump back to normal.
....since it is not happening it means there is a problem with Zebpay.

I believe in a year or two we will see the whole world moving in the same direction regarding bitcoin. most of the countries will start off by calling bitcoin things like "commodity" and then setting taxes like this, sometimes higher than it should be and some other countries will see its true nature and see it as a "currency".
in the end the best way is to take taxes from the investors on exchanges and remove taxes from it for those who use it as a currency. basically something like Japan with a lower tax.

if they want to raise funds then they should  raise funds why would they want to run an ICO which is Initial Coin Offering. why would they want to create a coin or token that does absolutely NOTHING to raise funds?
and that's the problem with ICO market. and that is the problem with this market, in my opinion. it has turned into a tool for literary anyone to make a lot of money out of thin air and do  nothing in return.

the topics here and mostly in the altcoin board are made for hyping purposes nothing more. and most of the times they are always created by some bag holder who has been tightly holding on to some altcoin that has been constantly losing value so now that the price has turned green a tiny bit they think they can hype it up by a simple comment enough so that they can dump and get rid of it.

the fact is all of them will panic sell soon when the dumps start again and they lose another  chunk of their money.

the only reason why people ever invest in anything is to make profit. and with ICOs the promise of getting rich is right there so the greed kicks on and they invest in them no matter how many of them fail the first day or scam the first day. and it doesn't matter that all of them are failing in the long run. people only see that short term possibility of profit and are blinded by it.
in my opinion all those questions about the background of the project/team/... are irrelevant. the only thing important is the hype surrounding the token and the market sentiment to see whether it can get pumped big or not at all.

I am not so sure about the "educating of people" part.
the way he has been advertising ICOs and even advertising some dead useless coins in order to pump them and make profit is more damaging than any kind of education that he might have given to others.
in my opinion McAfee has just increased the hype of bitcoin. he is famous for the high-price speculations after all and that will bring in hyped up people who want to become rich overnight. and that is another damage. I'm afraid if he runs for president we may see a lot more hyped up people who want to get rich fast in bitcoin!

you are doing two things wrong here.
first is that you make the conclusion based on nothing because market cap is nothing. it is a meaningless number for cryptocurrencies.
second you are comparing that meaningless number with a meaningful number which is Apple's market cap. Apple is a company and market cap is defined for companies. bitcoin is a currency and there is no market cap for currencies. try finding out what the market capitalization of US dollar is. you can't find anything because it does not exist! you can use money supply in a weird way though: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply#United_States then compare THAT with bitcoin.

not sure how you are calculating these numbers! bitcoin price is currently $6700ish
12.5 * $6700 = $83,750 per block
24 hours/day * 6 blocks/hour * 12.5 BTC/block = 144 blocks/day * $6700 = $964,800
you can round this up to $1 million. where did you get $90 million from?

this didn't start yesterday. this has been going on from day 1. new coins are being created each day and come into circulation. it started with 50BTC per block or 7200BTC per day and it has been over 2 years that we see 1800BTC being created every day. market IS at a balance whether it is $90 million or $1 million.

people don't buy/sell USDT with USD. that doesn't make sense. what they do is that they buy/sell cryptocurrencies with USDT. for example you deposit fiat on exchanges, buy bitcoin then while trading you can use USDT to sell your bitcoin or altcoins to go to and stand out of the bear market. for example on Poloniex you sell your LTC for USDT to stay out of the bear market and then buy back when it  reaches bottom.

so technically if some day USDT started dropping for whatever reason price of cryptocurrencies should not change because people would use their USDT to buy different coins to stay out of USDT dump. but the panic is a different story, the market panic call cause price drops.

the question is whether ALL of the Tether coins they released so far is backed equally by US dollar or not. otherwise we knew that USDT is backed by USD to some extent and the problem that was raised last year was the fact that they kept releasing new USDT coin and the current circulating supply of it is huge which makes you wonder whether they actually have that much fiat in reserve.
according to coinmarketcap.com the current circulating supply of Tether is 2.6 billion.

just because price has gone up it doesn't mean it is a bubble. for example you can't say $20k was a bubble just because it went from X to $20k.
a bubble is when price is higher than the intrinsic value of an asset. basically it means when price is going up a lot higher then the demand that there is for bitcoin. for example $20k happened because of a lot of hype thanks to a lot of good news and also because of lack of resistance above $10k+ so it was a bubble.

similarly just because price has come down you can't say it is no longer a bubble. again the same rules apply. price needs to come down to intrinsic value. I would say we have reached it for bitcoin and are even below it now. so there is no bubble and not only that but also we are currently in an underpriced state.

for the end user who wants to use bitcoin as a currency it is not at all difficult specially these days that there are lots of options to use as your wallet. maybe in 2009 things were complicated because you had one option and that was running a full node which could also mine for you but today you just choose a wallet and put the amount to pay in the respective field and click send. it is that simple! with web wallets, Coinbase, SPV wallets,... things are easy.

what you are pointing out is understanding things you don't need to know in order to use bitcoin. it is optional to learn and will help you know the technology. and that is not a problem with bitcoin you will face the same challenge if you try and understand any other technology like how does your smart phone work?

because contacting requires registration
https://novaexchange.com/contact/
there is no Email or any way of contacting them like on Trollbox or anything without signing in first and I can't sign in. there are also Twitter and Facebook links at the bottom which I don't use either of them.