Merit is given to you by people that read your posts and responses. A person can give you merit for any reason, but most will give you merit for a post or response that they like.

I give merit to informative posts and responses that are helpful and correct, contain information that is new and relevant, and that required some work or research to write. I give merit to opinions that are thoughtful, interesting, and novel. However, I don't give merit to members of signature campaigns.

It is called a "physical bitcoin". It is not practical to use them as currency because they are expensive to manufacture, so they are made for collectors mostly.

Nobody knows.

This is ICO spam. Nothing more.

Oh, I see. This is a scam.


This type of scam is not unusual. Typically, the scammer will:

1. Try to convince someone to buy the address.
2. Try to convince a newbie to send them some bitcoins in order to unlock the account.

One thing you can try is to run NiceHash. It will tell you what you can mine and how profitable it will be.

I would ask them why they think it is a scam. Research their reasons (if they actually have any), and I think you will find that they are simply misinformed.

I don't think very many ICOs will succeed. Most will fail eventually when the developers run out of money, give up, or run away. Some may take longer to fail than others, especially the ones that raised millions of dollars.

The purpose of the Bitcoin Discussion > Press forum is to post links to notable articles that mention Bitcoin. In the past, such articles were relatively rare and it was helpful to have a forum that would collect them. I valued the forum because it was interesting to see where Bitcoin would pop up in the mainstream media, and these links were provided good indicators about how the rest of the world perceived and reacted to the Bitcoin phenomenon.

These days, Bitcoin is mentioned constantly in the mainstream media, and there are now many media outlets devoted to articles about Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. Thus, the original benefits of the forum have largely evaporated. If mentions of Bitcoin are common, then they are no longer notable. If there are media sites dedicated to the subject, then there is less benefit to collecting links because the majority always point to these sites. The value of linking to articles mentioning Bitcoin has dropped. I note all of the links in the posts, but I only read a few of them now.

My suggestion is to retire the forum. Links to articles about Bitcoin could be posted in the Bitcoin discussion forum instead.

I would like to mention that there is a problem with the forum's moderation (in my opinion), but that is not part of my reasons for retiring the forum. I don't think that fixing that problem would improve the forum's relevance.

There is nothing to marvel at. It is called expectancy bias (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer-expectancy_effect), more specifically:

• Post hoc analysis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_hoc_analysis) -- you search the data until you find something that looks significant, and
• p-hacking (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_dredging) - you will find what you are looking for somewhere in the data if you search it well enough.

Another major contributor to the belief in pseudo-sciences such as astrology and TA is confirmation bias (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias) -- you notice the evidence that supports it, but ignore the evidence that refutes it. Street light interference phenomenon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_light_interference_phenomenon) is a great example of confirmation bias.

I don't know why people recommend gambling as a way to make money. It is a terrible suggestion. The casino makes money when you gamble, not you. It is a good way to lose money, and the more you gamble, the more you will lose.

In summary, in order for LN to hurt privacy, the network would have to be very centralized and nodes would have to collude.

I don't mind the FUD here at all. It helps to balance the irrational fanboy exuberance.

50 satoshis every 5 minutes is $0.06 per hour. Is it worthwhile for anyone in the world to work for $0.06 per hour, or even $0.18 per hour if you go to three faucets?

Increased adoption and lost bitcoins will cause the value to rise, and there is potential issue if the value rises. The potential issue is with the value of a satoshi, the smallest possible unit. If the value of a satoshi becomes too high, then that could cause problems.

For example, if a bitcoin is worth $1 billion, then a satoshi is worth $10. In this case, transactions could only send multiples of $10 and the minimum transaction fee would be $10.

Gavin Andresson has suggested that one possible solution is to increase the divisibility of a bitcoin, and that it could be done with a soft fork.

Segwit usage is still low. It is more likely that transaction volume has dropped because the crash scared a lot of people away.

Despite what was written in that article and what the previous poster wrote, it is very difficult to associate an address with a person. It is possible to determine addresses that are used by exchanges, but generally not by individuals unless they publicly associate themselves with an address.

That is completely unreadable. Please don't do that any more.

The answer is probably yes, but this is a Bitcoin forum. I think you will get better answers in a Zcash forum such as this one: https://forum.z.cash/ or https://www.reddit.com/r/zec

Another article written by somebody without basic knowledge of the subject.