I am sure glad you don't have the ability to produce rain. You don't have to be sour grapes because you did not RSVP to the party.
I would really like the authorities to get off their backsides and test out some of these coin makers. If they are legit - OK but some may not be. How easy is it to resell ?
There are 3 US exchanges, Bittrex, Gemini and Coinbase that are legally able to facilitate the buying and selling of coins in USA. There may be more but I am familiar with these three. Prices are slightly different on each exchange because it is matching buyers and sellers on each exchange. So you just learn the platform of the exchange you want to participate with and "resell" to the highest bid at the time. This is a major reason why the price fluctuates so much. What most on ET just can not get their mind around is that every bitcoin in existence is already owned by someone and the core of those believers are long term holders. The market of "liquid" supply is thin so when whales like Richard Ver start selling in mass and then the newbees get scared and sell then you have big drops. But the core of old believers and new born believers step in and start buying. In Sept when Bitcoin dropped from $5,000 to $3,000 the buyers flooded in and it was back to $3,900 in a few hours. Another thing that the Tulip Bulb people do not understand (incidentally the first tulip is see emerging from the ground this Spring I am going to stomp it to smithereens) is that "new born believers" who have done their research on Bitcoin are being born everyday. There are a lot of totally worthless coins out there in fact most of them are just that, and are truly scams trying to take advantage of the unknowledgeable. But the two prominent ones (in my opinion) are Bitcoin and Litecoin. Some people refer to them as the Gold and Silver of the coin market. Bitcoin is the long term store of value and Litecoin has a faster transaction speed. On a private wallet you can easily exchange between the two.
There are still a lot of uncertainties around LN. It requires locking large amounts of capital in channels to allow enough back and forth transactions to make it cheaper to use LN long term than transact directly on-chain. Too little capital and your channel becomes stuck with all coins on a single side. The best use case for LN is if your cash account remains within a tight range for long periods of time. Whenever if breaks from that range, you need to settle on chain and open new channels. I'm still skeptical and didn't give up on BCH yet.
"Authorities" don't "test out" coin makers, any more than they "test out" pizza makers. They respond to public complaints.
I agree it would be a real wonder if the very first version immediately worked as intended. It will have children's diseases and updates in code, just as the very first satoshi code is updated many times to the Bitcoin version we have now. Anyway the road to go to solve any scaling problem and high fee issues for the next 100 years, is to implement second and third layer software. Not by trying to put everything into 100 years growing big blocks on the first layer.
If the Bulgarian government is able to dump their BTCs at current price, they could pay off 1/5th of their debt. That would create a precedent that hey, it is free confiscated money and other government could go after cyber criminals too in hopes of getting some free coins. Imagine if the US would sell confiscated heroin for charity...
BTC went up 1K in 5 minutes. For those who don't know how to watch here is a live chart: https://bitcoinwisdom.com/markets/bitstamp/btcusd There was a heavy drop 90 minutes ago so we are kind of back where we started, around 15K on Bitstamp.