It's impossible to quantify but there will be an effect. OTC means open market trades that otherwise would've happened don't. And the volume of Grayscale's buying means other would-be OTC buyers have to go to the open market as they've been driven to it.

They could well be right. Good luck proving it.

It does seem a little unusual there've been price explosions that precisely align with Bitfinex's woes emerging. Ultimately though they can only provide a spark, it's down to the rest of the world to fool themselves into joining in and at that moment it becomes a legitimate bubble.

The feeling in my willy is that Bitfinex have brazenly abused their position in the past but have gotten away with it unscathed and the truth will never emerge.

But one thing I don't buy is the Tether as pure thin air thing. I'm sure there've been phases where it's had holes, but a peg doesn't last that long without some tangible backing.

The $100,000 by the end of next year expectation has been repeated so often it's starting to feel like fact already. That type of certainty tends to make me feel uneasy.

My guess is that it fails to reach that by a large enough factor to make everyone feel like total dickheads, or overshoots it to a truly hair raising extent. We tend not to get what we expect.

No idea what the deal is with inheritance tax in China but that's the one I'd be looking to avoid. I have no problem with my descendants paying capital gains, I'll be dead as fuck anyway. Inheritance tax feels like one final insult I'll be choosing to skip.

I'll leave a letter saying 'thusly I hereby doeth hand over mine coins' signed and with an empty space where the date is for them to fill in that's retrospective enough to give that tax the finger.

Most people fail at it.

I remember someone PMing me who got a BTC payout for some work when it had returned to $1000 after all those years. For some reason they wanted me to give them permission to sell it. I told them to sit and wait as you never know what'll happen and a return to four figures was significant after this long, but they were convinced it was a temporary blip and the price would carry on back down. They wanted out so off they went and were never heard of again.

I don't recall anyone predicting any move that's happened in recent times either. If you'd been furiously trading it more than likely you would now have zilch.

For me at least a decentralised exchange needs to build trust in exactly the same way Bitcoin has before I'd look deeper. I'd want to see years of abuse and heavy battle testing. You need to know the core product is rock solid because you won't have anyone to go crying to if it screws up.

Proper ones may not be custodial, but there's still a lot of scope for things to go wrong with the domain or hosting being hijacked, Bisq having that recent code problem, and then there are the ones that sprang KYC on people.

Their lack of significance means they'll be far down in terms of scrutiny and development competence too. Right now they feel like something I'm going to let others iron out the problems before I consider it.

They're doing a double disservice really. People who actually know anything about crypto will realise it's all clueless horseshit. People who don't and take it as gospel will turn up to find Arthur Hayes waiting for them in a dark corner with a cosh.

They should either send their legacy journos to crypto camp for a long read or poach someone who's vaguely familiar with the scene.

There've long been two economies - the one you see on trading screens where money is magicked up out of nowhere and winds up in the right pockets, and then you have the day to day reality for the millions of little people slowly getting worse off by the week.

I presume the divide will grow ever starker. They'll throw crumbs at the real people but concentrate on keeping those plates spinning at the top. The only thing that'll change that is how vocal the peons become about it and we're seeing the responses they're willing to throw at that right now.

Most people are using a decentralised currency to make more dollars. That's the only reason they're here. They will go to the places that allow them to do that with the least ball ache and with the most options to maximise the trades that get those dollars.

If Bitcoin required you to install a video camera in your face with a live link to the NSA many would do it if they believed the returns would be unchanged or better.

Very few care about its principles. Luckily many that do are in positions to guard it.



I think that's the important one. The choice should always be open to you if and when it dawns on you. I can't see it being anything more than a weird little niche for a long time to come though.

"The report says that “something needs to go really wrong” for Bitcoin not to increase in value. "

Erm, such as?

The price is still being batted around by small numbers of people on Bitmex. Until the hordes arrive I can't see much changing and there's little sign of them for now.

This reads like it was written by someone with little knowledge of previous cycles. Ask many people here and they won't expect much of this year. I for one do not expect it to get anywhere near 20 big ones this year. Fine with me if it does.

And they do realise Tether is also used to exit Bitcoin just as much?

They don't need to be the best. All they need to do is find a hole.

Coincheck kept $500 million worth of XEM in one hot wallet. XEM has multi sig actually baked into it but they couldn't be arsed with that. They could have saved $500 million by spending $100 on a Trezor but that was clearly an unacceptable expense.

We think all these exchanges are fortresses of glass and steel when the reality is many of them are floppy-haired asshole tweenies lounging around their loft, that they've probably skanked the landlord on for the rent. 

A good question is just as worthy as a good answer to something. It's refreshing when a newcomer's thoughts have an angle I haven't thought of before and it does happen every now and then.

Pretending to know something you don't, or having an empty opinion on it, is all over this forum. There aren't enough good questions.

We haven't seen it tested so there's no way of knowing. I'd say a fully Ver-ified .org would be misleading and unhelpful but wouldn't have much effect in the great scheme of things. The main thing it would do is enrage newbies and turn them against what he's attempting to push. A compromised bitcoin.org doesn't mean anything when every exchange, broker, website and bit of press deals with the real thing.

If your welcome to Roger's world is him sliding his scaly penis up you you're not going to develop warm feelings.

Bitcoin.com is a significant property too. BCH is still in the toilet price and penetration wise compared to the past. You can have an initial effect with things like that but it won't sustain if it's empty.

I'm sure plenty of exchange hacks are inside jobs so security measures don't mean anything in those circumstances.

Bter is now gate.io. they came up with some rubbish about hosting problems, said they'd pay everyone back from earnings and then lost interest and relaunched.

Those are not the actions of a blue chip operation and most exchanges are run by people who may find the temptation too much to resist.

We'll see what happens with ETH 2.0, but ETH has had the exact same problem quite a few times. Anything with a fixed limit and variable fee is going to experience the same thing if enough users arrive.

And since ETH has stablecoins running on it as well as Dex's and no doubt plenty of other things the potential for pressure on fees is seriously high. There doesn't have to be a spike in price or new users to up it. The more services use it for what it was designed to do, contract type stuff, the more demand there'll be for space on chain and that always costs.

Unless there's a raging bubble on, which only comes around every few years, the price is easily manipulated by small groups. All it takes is one strong buy or sell to get everyone else to pile in after it.

Bitcoin the system itself is quite possibly beyond evil influence, the price is fair game much of the time. This market is filled with scared, twitchy kiddies ready to run into the muscular arms of anyone more bold than them.

That's down to miners and the energy industry. It's possible that sometime relatively soon clean energy will be cheaper than any dirty alternative, if only because they've died out rather than being priced out but that's likely too.

A whiter than white Bitcoin would certainly add to its aroma. And the trend of power producers mining themselves is likely to accelerate as well. That added incentive is a whole new market that could drive more innovation and lower prices for infrastructure.

Hasn't China issued more decrees over Bitcoin as property than most other places? I seem to recall multiple judgements declaring it a tangible thing to own with the resulting rights.

No way am I going to bother getting any crypto involved in formal inheritance stuff and I dunno why anyone else would either. There's no need for it unlike conventional finance unless we're talking exchange accounts. I'll leave private instructions for the right time. If anyone asks in future they can say they were handed control many years before I carked it. There's no way of proving otherwise.

There's loads of seniors who are loathsome twats. And many more who are nothing but farmed accounts that you could create by shitposting once a day for a few months. There was no requirement to have quality posts to rank up before merit was introduced.

No one deserves respect just because they've been around for a long time. And even good members occasionally come out with total drivel.



This is good advice. Lots of people seem to disappear down the pointless feuding route and, even worse, get into the trust and reputation side. It's a monumental waste of life that achieves nothing other than wasting time better spent elsewhere.

I could maybe understand it if these people were doing actual business with each other, but not a single one is as far as I can tell.

I read it. Yes I know, but many others are caused by design or hardware flaws. I can see a day where I take the seed elsewhere as an issue comes up that can't be solved. It's an eternal battle that'll probably only heat up as the years grind onwards.