Get a hardware wallet if you have any significant amount, keep your seed very safe in a place only you know about.

You know ICOs are all very individual right? You have to do more research to understand if an ICO offers good value because there isn't already a market for their tokens to give you some signal (which are already not great signals). If you find an ICO you understand well (its in an area you know) that sounds good go for it. You may also know people who have insight into some ICOs and could give you tips.
However, the days of investing in ICOs at random and doubling your money are probably over.

This looks really cool, looking forward to giving it a try!

Ethereum is a great project, one of the best.

I can see why people would think it's prone to collapse in 6 months, it's a strange concept at first and for me it was only with time watching things develop that I started to see collapse as unlikely. When was the big bitcoin news this year? Give it a year or so after that and some positive news will act as a trigger to increase adoption.

Another possibility is that a different coin finds a way to get itself into the hands of the population with some usability leap forward.

The problem is governance, miners have a lot of control with Bitcoin, the stakes are getting higher and the number of people who effectively control the miners smaller. There are conflicting interests here (devs, miners, users) and bitcoin has no mechanism to resolve disputes.

There are other coins that try to build governance into the system, Decred and Dash have novel approaches to handling forks and they both retain some of the block rewards to fund development through a DAO.

If the proposal voting system is good, Decred will do very well.

People buying BCC in case the Segwit2X fork turns into a disaster that damages both versions of BTC, at least temporarily, and BCC picks up a lot of the slack. That's my take on it anyway.

Did everyone else whose BTC/LTC disappeared after verification get it back?

Haha, these threads are funny.

DeepOnion looks like a joke, from what I see I guess maybe the aim is to clog up the bitcointalk forums with spam? Quite successful in that case.

Ether is more interesting, greater potential for impact. I would say also greater potential for price increase long-term, but that's not based on much (nobody can give you a reliable prediction).

BTG has no replay protection either. I would treat your first interaction with BTG as risky, when you import your BTC wallet you're taking a risk with the software you're using, when you make a transaction you're taking a risk that it could be "replayed" on the other blockchain.

The advice I have seen, that I would trust, is to move all your BTC to a new wallet before you touch BTG - that way if something goes wrong the more valuable BTC are already elsewhere in a wallet that will never have anything to do with BTG.

Control over a population's currency is a big deal, crypto threatens that control, shakes things up in a way that is not predictable.

I'm new here so genuine question: is getting you to announce a fork a step towards making it a fork that people will talk about?

Curious about what the mechanisms are through which a fork becomes something that people care about. I'm guessing there have been plenty of "forks" that didn't garner much/any attention and quietly disappeared?

I was one of the people whose BTC at WEX disappeared after they got verified. After a bunch of emails to support my BTC have been reinstated yesterday (still waiting for the "BTCET"). Just wanted to mention it for people who are in a similar position, maybe your BTC/LTC will eventually be returned.

For a "new" coin like this how long would it usually take for mining software to be released? Is it just an adaptation of existing equihash mining software that will be done very quickly?

Just being persistent with emails to support. When they replied with something that didn't make sense I just said so politely and re-stated my concern. My BTC sum was small, maybe that has something to do with why I was successful, but hopefully they will get around to sorting this out for everyone who was affected.

Got a response from support today, they added the BTC that I quoted as having gone missing to my account!

Hope this gives hope to all others who are waiting for missing BTC to reappear after verification.

I still don't have the BTCET that should have accompanied my BTC but will be asking for that too.

I was also impressed with WEX/BTC-E returning to try again instead of just keeping whatever BTC balances they had. However it is not so encouraging when you see your BTC balance disappear and support don't respond to your tickets to explain what is going on, most people in this situation are probably quite keen to withdraw everything they have from WEX and move on. If it turns out to be a temporary issue that gets fixed I will change my stance, but for now...

I think I'm making a rookie error but it won't work for me, SOCKET ERROR: NO LOGIN/PASSWORD SPECIFIED

Is there some guide for how to set up the configuration? I can't work it out from the defaults.