I tried downloaded the electron wallet binary but it was removed as a detected Trojan. I managed to compile the wallet from the github but it was a pita on windows. It did work and managed to send my bcc to an exchange without problems once electron actually compiled.

Where are you seeing Japan as #1 in volume? Looking at http://data.bitcoinity.org I'm seeing these volumes for the past couple weeks:

Volume (in BTC)	Week 7/23	Week 7/16
USD/BTC	621k	982k
CNY/BTC	180k	255k
JPY/BTC	94k	168k

Looks like Japan's volume is still way behind both China and the US.

Of course that's insanely risky. We are well over 800 coins now (not to mention all the eth tokens). Assuming that 75% of those are garbage coins, you'll be spreading yourself pretty thin over 600 coins hoping to hit a winner. But lets imagine you did this. How do you decide when to sell and take your winnings? People get all excited when they see things like chaincoin rise 5,900%. I've heard people say "well if you put $200 into chaincoin before it pumped to $6, you would have had $12k." But imagine you actually did put $200 into chain coin when it was $.10. You see it double, do you sell? 2x is great. Now its 10x, do you sell? That's a 900% gain, more than anyone could hope for. 20x, 30x, 40x, 50x, 60x it just keeps going up you can't sell and miss out on these gains. And then within days you're back down to 6x and probably only going down from here.

It's easy to look back and say "Well only a couple bucks in this shit coin woulda been a ton at the peak." But in reality, it's impossible to tell where the peak is going to be. Overall, you'd be lucky to break even just trying to shotgun shitcoins. Even if you did make a bit of gains, it would probably still be much less than the gains from a simple strategy like holding the top 10 coins.

Currently bitcoin is limited to a total number by the rules of math and code. Yes, if you could get everyone to agree to change the code then the limit could be increased. Hell, if you could get everyone to agree we could change the code so that every block required a cat gif be attached. Literally any part of bitcoin could be changed with enough support, but we assume these things as reasonably core tenets since it seems unlikely for them to change. So the bigger question is why would we ever want to raise the cap?

Yes capital gains applies to physical items too. There's lots of information covering capital gains from people who hold gold and silver. And to answer your second question, no you can't ignore profits on the physical coin. Although being a simple brass coin, the actual value of it is going to be pretty low compared to the bitcoin on it. I would be careful on how you try to sell the coin as well. From what I remember, that operation was shut down by the government because they considered physically minted bitcoins something you needed a license to sell.

I'd be careful trying to learn trading from youtube or investopedia. Actually I'd avoid it all together. There's tons of great information on both sites, but also equal amounts of garbage. Avoid TA, or if you insist on using it read "Evidence-Based Technical Analysis" which will give more insight into how to actually judge the value of TA methods (spoiler: most simple methods like macd cross over are garbage). Put 90% of your capital into a hodl account, something you wont touch for a few years. Use the other 10% to play with trading. Demo accounts are about as helpful as trying to play poker with fake money. Without the emotion or skin in the game, you play differently. Most importantly, don't rely on emotions to trade. Learn how to backtest and learn how to translate what you think the market will do into a testable method.

So a couple concerns jump out at me. How are those providing wifi protected from users committing illegal activity through them. Are people just risking a visit from the police by offering wifi to unknown users? Also could be used to identify people who keep crypto information on their phone. Seem like a good way for potential muggers looking for crypto users to identify targets.

It would be long term capital gains, just like if you were selling a stock you had held for more than a year. The rate you pay for capital gains depends on your tax bracket. For someone filing as single the capital gains rates are:

Tax Bracket	|	Capital Gains
10%	|	0%
15%	|	0%
25%	|	15%
28%	|	15%
33%	|	15%
35%	|	15%
39.6%	|	20%

I'm not super optimistic on bcc taking off, but hey why not. I'll probably wrap up some of my alt coin shorts that were backed with btc and move the btc over to a paper wallet while we see what happens with the split. Personally, I don't think the price drop/gain is going to be as dramatic as the community thinks it will be, but I'm all for free spin off coins.

I get the desire to do limited supply do increase demand. But at only 100 coins, there will be so little volume that no exchange is going to pick it up. If no exchange picks it up, it will never see any real increase in price or use. I fail to see the point here.

Honestly most faucets are either not worth the time, or not worth the risk of getting some malware from a shady site. You're better off saving up a few bucks and just investing that.

I think when crypto currency has more wide spread acceptance the reaction to economic downturn might be similar to gold. That is, that people will use btc/altcoins as a safe place to store their savings.

But the current market is still in the early phases, so crypto is seen as more of a risky, speculative investment. So if a world crisis were to happen in the next month, I would expect to see crypto as a whole fall. People don't tend to put money towards high risk markets during times of uncertainty.