Thats right, only Bitcoin to paypal. Its pretty useless to me but maybe someone finds the conversion Bitcoin to paypal useable. But if it was paypal to Bitcoin then I could finally transfer my remaining paypal ballance to Bitcoin. Not sure why they cannot do it in both directions, probably its too easy to hack user logins to paypal accounts and you cannot reverse Bitcoin transactions.

Lightning Network channels could be usefull for decentralized crypto coin exchange, but I dont think you can actually trade fiat in trustless manner (real time and in huge volumes). Thats the problem with fiat, it has no public ledger so there is no way to prove in trustless manner fiat tansaction happened. But then, just decentralized crypto coin exchange is not much interesting, more important for people is actually fiat <=> Bitcoin exchange.

I would like to join this signature campaign.

Even broken clock is right two times a day, so nothing special at all.

Bitfinex hack (or inside job, whatever) shaked faith in centralized services instead, Bitcoin still works as expected. Because most Bitcoin exchanges are centralized services, it does not surprise me the lost faith in these. Still a long way to have much more decentralized trustless Bitcoin services, and not rely (and trust) to the centralized ones anymore.

The problem is this adds up to 1500-1700 ph, which is current hashrate. No significant shutdown of mining equipment after the halving so far, maybe up to 200 ph already shutted down after the halving (mostly last week drop), but was replaced by new equipment pretty quickly (bitmain not selling to public does not mean they stopped the production by waiting for new chips, there are always private deals possible or bitmain mining farm), plus most of the unprofitable equipment has to be sold and new buyer must be profitable (free or 1-2 cent electricity cost). So I would not expect much bigger drop anymore, maybe few more similar slightly negative % periods this year.

No bailout is the right approach. Many in crypto world feel this way, thats why there is surviving etc. Im not sure why so many Ethereum developers preffered the bailout, but my theory is basically every Ethereum developer and most eth investors invested in the DAO, so they all have conflict of interest and preffer the bailout to fix their mistake and get their money back.

Now compare it with Bitcoin, there are so many services already, so when one service fail, only very small percentage of developers/services/people lost Bitcoin there, and if the few become loud to argue for bailing out their mistake, they would be shut down by the majority (without the conflict of interest) with the arguments bailout is really the wrong approach.

It seems miners not much concerned about short-term Bitcoin price and continue hashing as usual. Bit weird as there must be a lot of S5 and older unprofitable hardware (I guess phil estimated about 500 ph) unless you pay nothing or like 1-2 cents from nearby power plant. Hard to believe last week hashrate drop included disconnecting all of the older and unprofitable equipment and the spike we see last few days is the new bitmain in house S9s (or privately sold to some big mining farm).

You can be robbed any time, thats why holding too much cash in your walet is dangerous. The OP example someone hold 28000 in a wallet without security guards is pure insanity, no matter whether wanted to buy Bitcoin or something else.

I do use localbitcoins to buy Bitcoins in person, but never in larger amounts. Carry in your wallet only as much cash as you are ok to lose if you get robbed, but I talking from my experience when someone stole my wallet and I noticed it later (and it has nothing to do with Bitcoin).

I have the same feeling Bitcoin wont go anywhere if really safe decentralized exchanges can not be developed. This could bring a lot of liquidity to Bitcoin trading. Current situation with centralized exchanges is these can be hacked or inside job can siphon off all deposited Bitcoins, thats why its very risky to trade the Bitcoin at exchanges and this limits Bitcoin liquidity a lot.

The number of possible transactions must go up as well since Bitcoin is almost on allowed transaction limmits decided to be enought many years ago - but technology advances continuously and without more transactions possible Bitcoin cannot be used much more than today, so not dying but on the limit already without possibility to be much more popular option.

Your right, if you buy gold at worst time when the price rose up a lot under very high demand, then there is chance you can be in the loss for the next 10 years, but generally gold retain the purchasing value quite well (not absolute dollar value as dollar steadily inflates). So you should not expect to be wealthier by purchasing gold after long time, but just to keep the wealth. But of course fluctuation in demand for gold might make you a loser as well especially when you need to sell the gold when the demand and prices felt a lot.

We should see what they come up with, but between the lines I can feel they going to use some internal dispute resolution system, which seems to be basically their arbitration although they say they removing such third party arbitration. If they told they going to use only crypto mathematical rules mantained by independend proof of work network instead, any third party arbitration or moderation wont be neccesary anymore, but then they would have a trusted blockchain solution, basicaly Bitcoin.

If Im right they come up with such privately controlled and moderated blockchain, I have feeling only banks might be interested in such IBM controlled blockchain moderating the disputes with their opinion, but those who preffer to follow exactly crypto mathematical rules to mantain the complete integrity of the ledger, going to use the most trustworthy blockchain instead, the Bitcoin.

For about the 5000 USD investment, buying gold taking you nowhere in 20 or more years. Gold might hold value very well, but you should not expect it appreciate in value much, so the equivalent of today 5000 USD might mean not much for you after 20 or so years when you already should have house and kids on their own.

On the other hand Bitcoin is much riskier but with a lot potential to take from your 5000 USD investment a fortune after a while, gold cannot offer such potential appreciation. Thats why I prefer putting such smaller amounts to Bitcoin. But if you had much more to store, like million USD, then gold is beter choice for most of this million, while Bitcoin only for much smaller part.

One Bitcoin equeals one Bitcoin no matter what price the illiquid exchanges trade the Bitcoin for. Not many people trade at these exchanges, thats why any suden activity in trade can move the price a lot (up or down). But wait longer periods and average out and the short term price moves from illiquid markets are not big issue anymore - to accomplish this you might buy or sell small sums at regular intervals regardless of price for longer interval, then you get much fairer price from this averaging. But obviously if you dont need to buy or sell, you still holding the same amount of Bitcoins (or percentage of all Bitcoins) no matter what.

Dont confuse hardfork with splitting and both chains surviving. Hardfork is very necessay tool to fix issues with the coin, and hardly anyone expects 1 MB Bitcoin forewer - and you need hardfork for the change to fix this arbitrary choosen size in the past (without any research what size (and why) should be used back then and in the future). So the only issue is when to do the hardfork, and this is where the opinions (and most importantly interests) differs. But talking about hardfork should never happen is wrong, Bitcoin already had a hardfork so Im surprised your still using this coin.

Splitting chains in ethereum happened because it is easier (difficulty readjust much quicker), and a bailout is a big no for many in the crypto world. Would it be ethereum developers and 80% hashrate refused the bailout instead, it is big question if the forked bailout would survive so long with 20% miners and no developer support instead (I guess no because I hate bailouts, thats why my prefference to ETC if ethereum smart contracts even become usefull in future, as they are not safe now).

I dont get it, the price drops a little, but the hashrate recovers a bit. Pretty counter intuitive. Looks like many miners dont care about the price at all so the phil wish for the price to drop to low 500 could not help much, quite opposite, the bigger Bitcoin price, the better for both holders + miners.

Edit: deleted offtopic part of this post about ethereum, but I just reacted to the previous discussion here and thought it would be ok, but I agree with phil decission its Bitcoin difficulty thread and altcoin talks belongs elsewhere.

Your right, gambling often leads to a loss of the coins, I lost some fraction of Bitcoin this way as well. The problem is even when you get lucky and you are winning you often dont stop, which then often lead to some losses which you get upset and you gonna try to win it back or even be in the profit again, but this often lead to a rage bust and loss of all of the deposited coins. Other than that I never used cloud mining sites so Im out of more Bitcoin worst decisions.

I have to agree cryptocurrencies need more time for people to adopt slowly over time. Fiat only advantage is everybody using it, but once this dominance ends people should preffer cryptocurrency public ledgers over secretly mantained fiat ledgers. In future there will be attempts from politics to force everybody to use the fiat again, because their debt based fiat pyramid can collapse so fast if people start ignore using fiat on a larger scale.

Public ledger is much better than secretly mantained ledger, because without public control there is so much room for misusing the power to have control over the ledger and creation of new fiat tokens in any quantity out of nothing - and you have actually work for such fiat tokens?

So for the next 20 weeks there have to be brave 10% of miners spending electricity to mine probably worthless coin - please try it yourselves spending electricity for 10% of Bitcoin hashrate (how many MWh ?) and getting basicaly coins worth nothing.

And for the next 20 weeks users going to wait in average almost two hours for each confirmation, sometimes half a day, and if lucky under one hour! There would be no congestion with 10mb blocks, but very long confirmation times for about third of a year.

Its hard to imagine for the first 20 weeks the price of these newly mined coins going to be the same as today Bitcoin price so 10% of miners can continue mining it without burning a lot of their money for the electricity.

The ZELUFD on the end of the Bitcoin address is the checksum. Bit lucky the checksum is all upcase, but it would be much harder to find XXXXXX checksum for different starting vanity address, but it would be pretty cool address ending with many X'es.

And yes, as was told no private key exist, its just valid Bitcoin address because the checkum is right. You can create any address you like and with correct checksum it is valid one, though you wont have private key to the address to spend any coins from the address.

The only problem is transactions are irreversible only after included to the block, eg after you get at least one confirmation. Thats why its tricky to use unconfirmed transactions, as you can sign as many different transactions as you like with the same bitcoin you own, but only one such transaction can be included to the blockchain, ever. So good work from bitpay how they can accept unconfirmed transactions to finalize the order process, if it really still works this way.