I would say Bitcoin mining is very risky as well as holding.  Anything related to Bitcoin is risky, but mining is very hard to predict.  You don't know what the difficulty is going to be in the future, or indeed what the price is going to be relative to the difficulty which is what matters.  You could end up with less ROI than you thought.

It is still relatively safe though.  I admire that you're looking into this.  You need a place with low electricity costs though, otherwise your costs could start outweighing the revenues after a while.

It's not all about the halving though.  That's just a factor that's there throughout all of the other factors that are affecting the market directly.  Obviously the price doesn't have to double for the halving, it just has to double every four years for miner revenues to stay the same without transaction fees rising and that could happen due to a whole range of other factors.

Market cap is a meaningless number anyway when referring to currencies.  Bitcoin is very unusual and it shouldn't be treated like the shares of a company - it's different and it's impossible to tell how much is in use or how much is lost or so many other factors.  Some people just like their soundbites.

You shouldn't look at it that way, really.

Bitcoin's price over the course of the past few years hasn't risen that quickly and it takes quite significant moves to do so - in reality, you're probably going to have a few dramatic rises and dramatic drops if you're in it for the long run.  It's only 20% if you sell it and buy it when it drops a bit, and no one can accurately predict exactly where the price will go to actually do that.

It's because compared to other places, Poloniex actually is a pretty good place to trade alts.  The problem is that Bitcoin related exchanges in general are pretty crap right now and Poloniex isn't going to be any different (especially with the state of USDT right now - this could just be the tip of the iceberg).

It would never really be a good idea to use a service to create a password for you (and even worse to use a service to hold your passwords for you along with what they're for).  Internet services like that are never actually reliable.

On some exchanges we already have.  It's super weird how GDAX is already into the $1400s - it's really hard to tell where the price actually is, we'd have to consider one exchange at a time.

Not true at all.  The amount of liquidity on exchanges is mind-boggling small and the vast majority of Bitcoin isn't even in circulation.  It wouldn't even take a quarter of that to pump up the price that far unless loads of hodlers give up and start dumping their old Bitcoin on exchanges.

Basically, right now it's a "pump" in that it's pretty quick growth and could reverse due to weak fundamentals, but the reverse would be to about $1100 rather than really significantly down.

The reality is that Bitcoin will rise, but it'll take time.  A full-on pump and dump could happen at some point, but it seems more likely that it would happen with an altcoin instead and the dump wouldn't fully happen - you could imagine some whales getting into ETH or something.

Genesis mining will never ROI.

If you're lucky, Hashflare will eventually, but the hashrate you have there will decrease in profit as the difficulty rises so eventually the earnings will be insignificant.

"Lifetime contract" is never true anyway.  How likely is it that some website for people Bitcoin mining for you at will is going to stay online for basically a hundred years?

How I look at it, satoshi's primary concern was a peer-to-peer network and when creating this he took inspiration from previous working peer-to-peer networks like Tor which do encourage anonymity.  It works a lot better for him to encourage pseudonymity when dealing with a public blockchain (as no one wants to reveal their personal information onto a public blockchain forever).

You could do this, but seriously what's the point?

If you had a paper wallet which you stored securely (in a safe or something) you'd be pretty well off without having to remember the keys for years.  If you ever stop using Bitcoin for a while, you might end up forgetting.

Why do people really care so much?  Bitcoin dominance in market cap is only a little part of its dominance overall, and losing a 50% majority would just mean that the dominance is spread between several cryptocurrencies.  Bitcoin is still massive and will continue to be.

Mining can result in profit.  Gambling can result in gains.

If you win in gambling, it can be because of skill, but it can also be temporary or luck or anything else.  Gambling is by nature unpredictable even with sports betting (unless you do arbitrage).

Mining is sometimes unprofitable, but that's something you can predict.  Gambling is not.

Does it even matter if it is?  Ethereum is very strange since its properties are an asset are questionable and the centralised development team means that its supply could be manipulated at nearly any time.  Other cryptocurrencies still have very insignificant market share - the Litecoin bubble ages ago brought it as high as DASH became.  Bitcoin in general might not stay "king" but it has its own properties and immutability gives investors a certainty.  It's just going down a different path.

Clearly this subreddit is capable of terrible confirmation bias.  Most of the claims in the article could be made with slightly different statistics and phrasing from Core supporters (could be at tens of thousands from the LN et cetera).

Both subreddits are just weird echo chambers for each side and no one seems to actually interact with the other side except for claiming that they're shills or that they're censoring their respective subreddit.

What's even the point?

It's very close to impossible to hack the network.  There are attacks like 51% attacks but those are on transactions not the network as a whole and mainly affect transactions sent by people who have 51% hashrate (meaning that it would be detrimental to the company to try and manipulate any other transactions because the price would drop down).

Whether someone understands the technicality isn't actually that relevant because "technicality" is extremely subjective.  It would be condescending to people to pretend that they're above everyone else because not understanding technicality means that you shouldn't be able to have a strong opinion - people who do understand it change their views and have different views to other people all the times and often both sides have at least an ounce of reason.

They're trying to give themselves legitimacy by looking like they're helping Bitcoin out somewhat.  It means that some people will see this as progress even though the only reason they're doing this is so they can get away with charging taxes and regulating exchanges more heavily so that it's actually harder to buy and use Bitcoin.

It's better off as an asset.  Bitcoin doesn't need approval from governments.

Or the feigned acceptance of the US.

Mt. Gox had been around for years, but it "went bankrupt" and took about 200,000 Bitcoin.  It was huge.

The lesson is that Bitcoin exchanges are barely regulated and they're not insured.  People like to talk about whether banks are trustworthy when we say that exchanges are unsafe, but banks are insured by governments usually up to around $100,000 per year - they're also heavily regulated and
usually have been running for many years rather than just a few like Bitcoin exchanges.  Banks do mess around with your money but your money is safer than a Bitcoin exchange (although not a Bitcoin wallet, since those can be very, very safe).

Irrelevant.  Still a scam, so why should we care whether it's paying?  HashOcean lasted over a year, all it means is that they steal more people's money when they disappear.