This could be more serious than it seems at first.  Brussels is the capital of the EU and the EU already has a pretty bad stance on cryptocurrencies.  If Belgium wants to ban it, it could get through to the EU and other countries could be banning it left right and center.

Western countries banning cryptocurrencies could be a huge chain reaction.  If one country bans it, the people who use it in that country will then mostly be using it for illegal activities, which would result in other countries thinking the same thing about people finding potential to be anonymous with it and then more and more countries could be treating it negatively.  Belgium isn't a big country but this could have worse implications than we would think at first.

Not at all.  Your argument is that the majority of miners support bigger blocks, but a better phrase would be that a majority of the mining hashrate supports bigger blocks.  The mining hashrate is represented by a small group of pools, and since miners typically gravitate towards their own interests they will go to whichever pool they prefer rather than, necessarily, to the one which supports a specific scaling solution as many don't care.

In fact, SegWit currently has a marginal lead over BU due to F2Pool beginning to signal for it.  What matters is how much hashrate is favouring each side, not how many blocks have been mined for each (as the number of blocks is subject to variation so you have to measure it over a longer timespan) and with the addition of F2Pool, the hashrate currently is supporting SegWit by a small margin.

The miners don't even represent the community either.  No one can reasonably claim that the miners' interests are always that of the community and a reason for supporting a cause should never be "other people support it so I do too".  It should be because the system holds weight as an idea and in code.

Really don't need to make an alt account to shill for a scam accusation.  You'll need evidence or it won't hold any weight.

Actually, back when I was dabbling with faucets a little while I used that app and I did get a withdrawal from there.  A couple of months ago before I deleted it, I remember the threshold rising from 10,000 satoshi to 50,000, withdrawals being processed less often and lowered payouts.  They might have been struggling with money and potentially with the fees on the network as well.  They could have turned scam I guess, but you'll still have to prove it.

With Bitcoin and unregulated online businesses like those, they could be a scam or stop being a scam at any time.  Even if they're lasting for a really long time they could still be a scam.

They could even be legit but just be a site that follows another group which is more private and announces the pump when they do. 

No matter what their situation is, pumps and dumps are some really shady activity which you probably shouldn't be taking part in and for everyone who succeeds, someone else is going to fail (and there's very little skill in it, you could be dumping at the right or wrong time based on a matter of seconds).

He pumps his own agenda, but that doesn't mean that he's naive and would just think he'll always succeed.  I do think that he has a point.

The Chinese government has constantly been changing their stance on Bitcoin in confusing ways for years and usually I just think they're trying to cause some price change that would be as profitable as possible for them.  For all we know they have a pretty significant stake in Bitcoin.

Clearly most of the regulations they're trying to implement on Bitcoin are trying to stop new investors getting caught in scams and Goxes.

I don't know why you think that but according to coinmarketcap it has the fourth highest trading volume, only after Bitcoin, Litecoin and Ethereum.  It's responsible for about 4% of the total.

Plus it would have a much stronger effect on certain exchanges - namely Poloniex and Bittrex.  This could have a chain reaction of panic on other exchanges, and combined with Bitfinex seemingly fucking everything up it could be much worse.

Blockchain.info has about 13 million accounts, which you can find from the stats on their charts and graphs page.  However, this doesn't show how many users there are because most of the wallets are inactive, many of them are hacked, many of them are made by people who create several accounts, there could be any number of reasons for there being that many wallets.

You also wouldn't be able to determine how much Bitcoin is in each account because that would be a violation of the users' privacy and could result in people targeting certain users for phishing scams.  Therefore it's hard to say what the market share of each wallet would be.

It would only be possible to determine this if every user of a wallet confirmed their identity when they created a Bitcoin wallet, which would never happen due to Bitcoin users' usual opposition to this.  It's also not a good idea to suggest recording online wallet usage as recording the funds in nodes would be even harder, as well as hardware wallets like TREZORs.  

0xfff seems to basically be a shitposter anyway.  The posts that he did in bursts are all just barely reaching any minimum amount of characters and are clearly done with the intention of getting the posting over with as quickly as possible.  Even without post bursting, I would be surprised if any legitimate campaign manager kept him in for long at all.

If your posts are vaguely readable and have decent English grammar, that doesn't make them good.  Users who aren't in a sig campaign tend to post a variety of lengths and arguments for different topics - anyone in a signature campaign who isn't a spammer should at least feign that variety while posting on topic, and preferably have it naturally.

Regardless, managers obviously have the right to remove any user at their discretion - that's just common sense and is stated on nearly all sig campaign threads.  Withholding funds is not a scam when it's someone else's funds rather than your own and you knew that there was no guarantee you would receive their funds.

The manager also has no connection to the Yo-Ex exchange.  The exchange's perspective is that they hired a trustworthy community member to escrow funds and manage the campaign for them (which they did).

If they ever do allow withdrawals again though, it would be reasonable to assume that they would actually have a lot more full-time workers just because the exchanges would be regulated.

A combination of the most regulated possible exchanges and a high volume of trading from Chinese whales would be the two main factors causing Chinese exchanges (and Japanese exchanges, and potentially Indian exchanges  if it isn't completely illegal) to have high numbers of employees and dedication from their staff.

Changes in the Bitcoin protocol are voted through by miners.  The only scenario in which they would vote to basically directly lower their profit through lower transaction fees is if they thought that Bitcoin was going to completely collapse.

The Bitcoin price isn't actually going to collapse though, only its principle is going to fail (in that it will end up being a digital store of value rather than a full blown currency but its price will rise).  Therefore miners won't vote through a change to the PoW protocol, especially since they have thousands of dollars invested into machines that would become pretty much worthless since that was their only purpose.

It's great to have ideals but I don't see where they're going.

$1300 is nothing.  The price has already breached it, in the build up to the ETF decision.

Bitcoin has been steadily (well, not steadily, but it has been) growing since its beginning.  Just last year the value was under $500.

If you don't count the 2013 pump, you'll find that Bitcoin has a long way to go just based on technical analysis.  A rise from $1300 to $2000 really wouldn't be that much, especially in about a year and a half.

Transaction accelerators with no fees tend to have hidden agendas since there's no economic reason for them to provide that service when they could make more money.  In ViaBTC's case it's to argue for BU which they most likely believe would make them more money in the long term.  

Plus ViaBTC is already pretty saturated, their service isn't going to be that fast when they're only including some transactions in the blocks that they mine.

Fee accelerators shouldn't be free because it makes people just try to screw over other people who actually need the accelerator because they did something wrong with the transaction.

Very misleading way of looking at it.  Bitcoin's hasn't really surpassed these fiat currencies at all because:

-Fiat currencies are localised as they are the legal tender of a country.  Bitcoin would only be larger than them if the amount being held in that area was higher than the amount of fiat currency being held.

-Bitcoin's market cap is not the same as fiat's market cap because most of it is not in circulation and Bitcoin has many different features to these conventional currencies.  Much of the price isn't from people who spend it regularly but is from investors which also manipulates the market cap in relation to fiat.

You claim that you joined to test the service.  If you were trying to prove that it was a scam site, why did you get "many" referrals?  That's about the least trustworthy activity you could ever participate in, making people throw their money away in a scam site so that you can earn a few measly dollars.  You're pathetic.
No, for admitting that you're a malicious scammer yourself to knowingly bring people into a scam site.
You can "investigate" yourself.  I hope your friends all leave you.
Thinking - no.

This is an oxymoron.  Escrows are people that you trust with money (when you're dealing with an untrustworthy person), so all you need to know is how to determine who to trust.

The rule of thumb is that unless you've been on the forum for a long enough time and see who others trust significantly, you shouldn't trust anyone except for people near the top of the list of Bitcointalk escrows.  Green trust doesn't necessarily prove that someone won't scam you and red trust doesn't necessarily prove that someone will scam you (although in most cases red trust will).

Also, when you're dealing with any escrow make sure you verify their address in the escrow thread if you can and verify their PGP signature if you can as well.  You need to be communicating with the escrow directly and be careful of people with very similar names to the escrows trying to pretend to be them.  Sometimes people who supposedly deal with escrow try their best to scam you and make fake messages from the escrow.

How did you find his identity?!

If even banks have failed to patent something as basic as blockchain technology, it can't be patented or it's very hard.  Satoshi clearly didn't want to patent blockchain technology and get fees from people using it - there would be no point, Satoshi hardly needs more money right now anyway and the blockchain isn't really something that he invented, it's just something that he innovated in the public eye.

It's because the US economic model is terrible.

Their model of taxation doesn't make any sense.  The problem is that unless the taxes are on things that can be monitored more heavily like income rather than companies' profits, there will be an advantage to large businesses as it's worth it for them to spend money on elaborate schemes to avoid tax while it never is for a small business.  That leads to large business actually paying less taxes because of tax havens, and they can therefore grow exponentially from their convenience (and this ends up hiking the taxes on companies that actually pay, creating a vicious cycle).

The two solutions are:

-Remove taxes altogether and move to a more right-wing/anarcho-capitalist model.  In my opinion it would be a bad idea since when every company runs in the private sectors, everyone who pays for services has to basically pay profit to another company and so poorer people would find it much harder to survive and also education would be hard to get if you're poor, giving children less opportunities based on their wealth.  Also, loads of disabled people and others who need a safety net would die.

-Change the taxation system in ways that actually benefit the poor and small businesses rather than the rich.  This could either involve social-democratic models like we see in Scandinavia (which work pretty effectively in my view) or just remodel the taxation system to be more centered around individuals than companies. 

Naturally, capitalism results in inequality but the amount can be regulated.  There's also always the possibility of communism but I'll ignore the arguments for that just to avoid pissing everyone off.

The discrepancies in prices, even in triangles or from different exchanges, tend to even themselves out within seconds.  On forex markets you're talking about fractions of a second because of how many people like to do arbitrage anyway.  With cryptocurrencies I'm sure there are a few opportunities, especially on altcoin exchanges, but it would still be very hard even if you had a bot completely automate the whole process.

On Bitcoin exchanges the spread and fees will outweigh any real benefit from arbitrage.

Every time you make a transaction with your TREZOR, you have to confirm the transaction by pressing a button on it, which is a form of 2FA.  You also have to log into it with a PIN to do that, and every time someone wrongly guesses your PIN the amount of time it takes to enter it again changes by a power of 2.  So the only way someone could get access to your funds is by literally walking into your house, grabbing you and holding a gun up to your head and brutally forcing you to reveal the location of your seed.  It would be much harder to take your funds from a TREZOR than it would be from a credit card.

Even if your TREZOR got destroyed you could recover it with your seed on a BIP compatible wallet like Electrum or Mycelium.  You can even use your Mycelium wallet as a bridge to access your wallet along with the official TREZOR chrome extension and bridge.

So even if they were to track you through the blockchain you'd be safe, which is more than can be said for software wallets like Electrum because unfortunately if they found out about you they might be able to target you with malware or something.  TREZORs don't communicate data which could infect them with malware - it's impossible.  I don't work for TREZOR but it's pretty damn cool.

If you have any other concerns you could check out their security threats page.

Those casinos were popular because they offered something original, could gain a lot of money from investors for their bankroll because they were trustworthy, and could run advertising campaigns.  The best that you could ever hope to make would be some kind of pathetic script casino that has been made by a hundred people before desperately grabbing for money who never get it.

You would have to have actually good ideas for a new casino and hire a developer (with a good amount of money that you have to make this casino) to help make it for you.

You would also have to handle marketing properly and advertise on various sites related to gambling, Bitcoin or both.