Having pictures of an area where the horizon appears flat doesn't prove that the Earth is flat any more than standing under a shelter proves that it's not raining.  It's just an area of land which appears flat because, believe it or not, the Earth is pretty damn big and you can only see for a few miles at most.

If you want to believe that the Earth is flat, go and send up a camera tens of miles into space to check for specifically you as thousands of people have done before, but don't just claim that the Earth is flat when it's 100 metres up and can't see the whole Earth yet.

All of our best and most relevant scientific knowledge suggests that the Earth is closer to a sphere than any other shape (or an ovoid).

Bitcoin is still pretty stable and will continue to be.  The ETF did not destroy Bitcoin, far from it.  I think this shows the strength of the community and that people are properly in this for the long run.

This is true because Bitcoin's core fanbase fits a niche of people who are interested in tech.  This is not something that can just disappear or that will disappear to support another cryptocurrency because of the slightest variation to the blockchain system that they create.

This.  If you want physical cash you have to be really careful about a scam at all stages - use LocalBitcoins and:

-Check seller feedback and make sure that they are reputable.

-Meet in a public place to keep yourself safe.

-Check carefully for counterfeit money.  If the seller is genuine they should not be offended by this.

Most of the time, gambling will result in you losing out, so just make sure to be careful and gamble responsibly.  Investing is varied, it all depends on what you invest in.  If you invest in something fairly reputable (e.g. casino bankrolls, related to gambling), then you'll probably get ROI but it'll take a long time and you shouldn't expect anything straight away.

That's not always the case.  Gambling is a poor idea if you're trying to earn profits because the odds will always be on the house's side (they have to make a profit, right?) but it's not the best way to lose money.  The best way to lose money is to keep it in fiat currency (just kidding).  Seriously, trading is not perfect and you can't expect returns all the time.  Many traders have to lose out for other people's profits, and it's the amateurs who try too early who suffer from this.

People who only hold are not contributing to any rises in price.  While people who panic sell on a decision which will clearly only affect Bitcoin reguarly and that is annoying, I don't accept that holding Bitcoin will do anything.  If all you're doing is hoarding it you're not creating any much-needed demand.

Bitcoin's value is being held up by investors and traders, but its use as a cryptocurrency, the only thing it was actually supposed to be, is dwindling.

I don't think Bitcoin is dead though.  There will always be a way through this because if miners feel that people will give up and stop doing transactions, that'll be an incentive to actually sort out the network by implementing SegWit, which I do believe will happen eventually and Bitcoin will become scalable.

You're right though, for now, Bitcoin is pretty annoying.  My transaction with over 3mBTC of barely 10mBTC took over 2 days to confirm.  This is not the consistency and professionalism that a great network like Bitcoin should have.

Announcing this before it's even been released, without building up any trust at all, is not going to make people want to use your service.

People on this forum are rightfully very skeptical about new services like this because it's the sort of thing that can be a scam and keep it's reputation unharmed for a fairly long time (until people get loan repayments, which may be a long time).  Especially in the cryptocurrency world where people can be near-anonymous and make scams which don't get them prosecuted, you have to make sure you can prove your company is legit.

When you make posts like this, you need to let people know exactly why you've made this service, because it seems too good to be true that someone would run a service without any obvious ways of making profit.

I don't necessarily doubt your sincerity myself but you can see why people would and I hope you'll take this advice seriously (even though I'm new myself).

It's both.  I find Bitcoin interesting as a new idea which I believe will become more popular over time so it's great that a hobby can make money in itself.  But of course I think that when Bitcoin is more popular and is adopted in stores I'll spend it more (of course I will spend it in places that accept it, but that's not many).  You could also even view that future purpose as being fun - money might not buy happiness, but to some extent it does, especially when it's as convenient as Bitcoin.

Bitcoin could be so great for traveling and that would be fun.  Imagine going around the world, not having to convert into any local currencies, only having to take your phone with you and you could pay for anything.  So the future purpose could even be fun in itself.

Generally the fees and the network in general are ridiculous right now until enough miners give support for SegWit for it to be implemented.  This seems like it'll take a long time as Bitmain has a monopoly on mining and the owner, Jihan Wu, is opposed to its implementation. 

As a temporary solution for, for lack of a better word, important transactions like yours, you could use a Transaction Accelerator.  These are essentially a small group of miners which take the transaction ID of your transaction and try to get it into the next block.  However, don't use these for all transactions as then they will become useless (because they would be attempting to prioritise all transactions.

True, and all that making people keep the same address would do is either to create new wallets or to just move to a more anonymous cryptocurrency, like cloakcoin which some people seem to like.

Countries will decide whether Bitcoin should be legal or not partially based on their commitment to privacy, but ultimately no one can entirely ban something on the Internet unless they entirely remove the conventional Internet for their own purposes (e.g. North Korea's intranet), and by compromising its principles Bitcoin would leave itself vulnerable because if a government decided to ban it, people would find it much harder to hide their use.

Yep, it's definitely a scam.

It tries to fool you by suggesting that withdrawals can take a really long time but there's no genuine reason to take so long, it's just to convince you that you're actually going to get your money so that you might keep reinvesting or referring people.

No site that suggests exact returns is legit, especially when those returns are very high and it doesn't mention hashrate, electricity or maintenance costs etc.

Cloud mining in general is a pretty bad idea - even HashNest which is legit is not necessarily a good investment and I would avoid them because Bitmain has too much of a monopoly on mining in general.

There's even less assurance that altcoins' prices will remain stable.  Trading altcoins is extremely risky if you want to actually make a profit, because unless you're pretty skilled you can't make a lot of profit on the more stable ones like Lite or Doge and when you try to invest in less popular coins they're very likely to just get dumped.

Bitcoin's value being over an ounce of gold is not really relevant.  People could choose any arbitrary amount of gold, which is not really a unit, and then go on and say that Bitcoin is more valuable than gold, but the actual market cap of Bitcoin is obviously significantly less than gold.

Bitcoin needs to be viewed as a genuinely stable investment and that isn't achieved by some clickbait sites arguing that Bitcoin is better than gold because the value of Bitcoin is more than an ounce of gold - it needs to show stability and prove to investors that it is a genuine solution rather than a fad.

This thread is kind of pointless, because all people who like Bitcoin enough to be on this Bitcoin forum are pretty unlikely to think Bitcoin is a curse on society.  It does cause temporary issues, such as the high power usage, but there isn't a lack of power, it's just that renewables are not used enough, and since Bitcoin mining is barely profitable in Western countries without renewable energy, it creates an incentive, with state backing, to use it.

It may be more stable than it was before but I don't accept that this is natural, sustainable growth.  Nothing just grows by basically half its value in a few weeks - it seems like all this is just based on huge amounts of hype that Bitcoin has built up recently (partially because of the ETF).  Before it continues to grow healthily as it did from 2014 to a couple of months ago, we'll inevitably see another crash.  Even if the ETF is approved, it'll just cause a slightly higher bubble, which will burst before the ETF actually starts bringing healthy growth to Bitcoin.

After 2040 when the flow of new Bitcoins dries up, the answer is yes since miners would be reliant on transaction fees.  Before then, it will still harm Bitcoin.  Bitcoin was intended to be used as a currency, and this idea of just hoarding it and never actually doing anything with it will not contribute to any price rises that occur.