Ether isn't even that cheap. Transaction fees jump to $0.30-$0.50 whenever there is a lot going on. People blame Bitcoin for slow transactions, but there have been several instances this year (and a lot back in 2017/2018) where Ether transactions were stuck in the mempool for 10 or so hours due to low fees. Imagine you trying to utilize a dapp where your transaction doesn't get through.... That sucks.

I can utilize RBF and bump the fee of my Bitcoin transaction when there is a sudden increase in transaction volume. There is no such a thing within Ether. You need some technical understanding to double spend in order to not end up waiting hours, which the far majority of the people don't have.

I'm thankful this has never had the space it needed to run on top of Bitcoin. 

Totally right. If people think logically, an exchange would have put a stop to this selling if it was actually going on because they won't allow scammers to empty their order books.

People remember the 5000BTC dump on Bitstamp not that long ago? The exchange started an investigation because it left a massive impact on their order book. This is was a legit market sale and got the exchange triggered. Imagine what happens when scammers are dumping. Exchanges would not allow this activity to take place.

On top of that, selling such a large number of coins means that you have verified yourself, and thus the exchange has all the information it needs about you. Do you think scammers will verify themselves after stealing an insane amount of coins?

This is classic manipulation of news. Great timing.

People sell out of fear because they believe these scammers will dump their bags. What happens is that the panic sellers are crashing the price, but as stupid as people are, they believe that the price is going down because these scammers are selling. One way to look at this positively is that weak hands are eliminating themselves. 

How many times have we seen this happen before? Come one people. If it's too difficult to handle then this place isn't for you.

It could actually change for the worse if China gets more of a say in Hong Kong. In order to avoid running into problems later on, it makes sense for people there to convert a portion of their worth into Bitcoin and have it sit there until they need it. It's better prepare for worse and to not see it happen than to not prepare for worse and see it become reality and be trapped.

I have seen raw coverage of how ridiculously aggressive the cops are against people randomly walking by going to their work for example. I get it that the cops are instructed to go against those protesting, but focus on them instead of innocent people just trying to continue their day as normal as possible. Horrible situation. 

People are only emotional when they invest with money they can't afford to risk and potentially lose entirely.

Most of the rational investors have a pretty solid understanding of risk management and actually stick to it. Even if they lose what they put in, it's just a small fraction of their entire portfolio. The immense growth potential Bitcoin offers to them easily outweighs the tiny allocation they might potentially lose. Risk reward wise Bitcoin is an easy buy.

Being a rational investor without feeling a strong bias towards a certain asset is a fantastic characteristic. Get in and out on time and don't be too greedy. Lovely.

Same institutions, same allocations. Bitcoin is a risk-on asset, even more so than all the flashy tech stocks that go through a heck of a lot volatility.

Debt flowing into the stock market means debt flowing into Bitcoin, though the amounts flowing into Bitcoin are obviously just a fraction of that. If stocks take a dive, you can bet your left sock that Bitcoin will be sold down too. The effect of this might not have been as strong back in the days as it is right now, but that's just because there is more institutional presence now and their positions in Bitcoin have increased too.

But then again, Bitcoin is so unpredictable that it could just as easily go up when stocks go down, without there being an actual outflow of stock market capital to Bitcoin. That's the beauty of Bitcoin. Assuming that something is going to happen based on what happened in the past can get you rekkt hard.

Knowing how governments don't like to hand over any sort of control, especially not to an entity owning more than half of all the tokens in existence, it's very unlikely.

This is the first time they can build a protocol that doesn't require them to depend on financial institutions they have to beg to freeze your assets and whatnot in case they don't like what you use your money for. They can do it in an instant themselves with their own protocol.

Heck, if there was a single doubt that Ripple would be partnering with the fed, I would buy a ton of XRP myself and wait for the announcement pump. 

Nah. People always try to connect dots but that's just how they are. It helps whales unload a portion their bags to take off some risk without being called manipulators, because now people have pointed their attention to this ponzi scheme and blame them for the decline in the price.

XRP is actually quite an interesting coin to follow when it comes to measuring the sentiment within the crypto market. It has been slaughtered before Bitcoin and Ethereum hit their daily lows, and that while XRP is usually not as volatile as other cryptos in both the up and down directions.

Poor altcoiners. They believed that when Bitcoin would take another hit the altcoin season would start, but it seems that smart money isn't sharing the same opinion.

I rather see the price go up without news, which is what Bitcoin has always done in the past, than seeing the price go up in the runup to the CME market going live where investors and traders sell the news. You have nothing to sell on right now. The price can legit pump way higher than any price you consider realistic or super high already.

As always, people get hyped up when the price is going up non stop for months. We are all biased towards price appreciation because we hold so many of it. These selloffs help you wake up again and not underestimate the speculative side of the market that doesn't care about your holdings and the fundamentals.

I'm pretty sure that if we would have hit $9000 today as new yearly high, people would be celebrating and bring back their flashy memes. 

It's not a 'problem' as long as this is the low and we leave it at that, because that would mean we have another higher low.

Currently we have tested the 100EMA on the daily for the first time since we had the pump from $4000 to $5000. I think that's a very important moving average to focus on. If we do close below it, that would definitely spell a bearish trend continuation with much lower lows as result. From here it's going to be interesting to see if this was the breather the market needed, or just a temporary burden on the way down to lower lows.

For sure. People outside the rational circle buy because they see the price go up and sell because they see the price go down.

I wonder how many of the self-proclaimed analysts and experts considering certain price levels to be a good buy actually buy themselves. I think not many. If their analysis ever worked they would be making a lot of money trading Bitcoin instead of analyzing a market they don't understand.

Today's "gift" price can turn into a shit price you wish you didn't touch the day after. It's so subjective and nonsensical that people should never follow any of this advice.

The US is the financial capital of the world. If you look at the largest ETF markets in the world, you have the US with $5 trillion being the absolute number one, while the second largest ETF market with a strong Bitcoin representation (Japan) comes in at a measly $300-$400 million. I think the numbers do speak for themselves.

Investors care only about the numbers and how willing institutions in a certain country are to allocate a certain percentage of their portfolio to speculative assets. Nothing beats the US in that regard.

The big money that moves the market doesn't care about decentralization, only we do as perma bulls. For them it's just a very lucrative financial adventure.

It helps to have a bait wallet with a very low amount of satoshis in it. If ill minded people somehow find out that you do have Bitcoin, and they force you to hand it over, you give them the bait wallet and they at least have something to take with them. If they know you have Bitcoin and you say you don't have any, they will get really aggressive and who knows what happens then.

In these countries the wealth standards are pretty low overall, so even a low amount of satoshis might somehow be enough to make them leave 'satisfied'.

I also have a bait wallet file (without password lock/encryption) on my computer with a few hundred dollars worth of Bitcoin in it. If a hacker ever gains access to my computer, chances are high that this wallet file will be emptied. Simple but yet a very efficient bit of security alert.

Newbies are very simple. They look at a coin such as Dogecoin (or any other shitcoin for that matter) and wonder why it's much cheaper than Bitcoin. Based on that they have a point, it's much more expensive fee-wise, but they lack the understanding of why there is such a massive difference in fees.

If they don't understand the very basics of on-chain transactions, they will not understand what Lightning is and how to tap into it. Even if they install a custodian wallet, they will complain about 1001 different things that will make their Lightning experience suck. First they have to understand the workings of on-chain transactions, then off-chain. 

Did they? Bolivars and the Petro are the only legal tenders within Venezuela, unless they changed their law and now also accept foreign currencies (which I highly doubt).

People and businesses do accept fiat currencies such as the us dollar and to some degree others, but this doesn't mean they are legal tender because they aren't approved by the government as such, which is a requirement if you want something to be a legal tender.

Good thing is that people don't have to care about what their government deems legal tender. Venezuelans have been preferring us dollars over their own currency for many years now, and if they actually kept their dollars in a sock or whatever, they should have done well saving at least a portion of their wealth from becoming worthless.

Bearish perhaps on the very low time frames, but not if you zoom out and look at the bigger picture.

We're forming a very large bullish pennant as we speak, and if it ends up breaking in the direction of the current trend, which is up, we'll blast through this year's high and potentially stress the all time high. If we add that the block halving is inching closer and closer, it adds to the probability of this pennant to break out to the up side.

But you have to look at the bearish side too, and this is admittedly very ugly in case of a break out to the down side. If this plays out I personally aim at a bottom somewhere between $7000-$8000 but don't rule out a sub $7000 wick. Great opportunity for those who look to buy lower though.

It depends on where their stops are located. Most of the people aren't selling manually but do it through triggered stops.

I think that it's safe to say that when we hit $8999 the price will experience a fast decline towards $8500, or even lower if there isn't enough liquidity on the buy side of the order book. The few noobie noobs that do end up selling manually have very likely done so already, which if you look back, they have done a good job looking at where the price is right now.

I remember people (mainly hodlers) making fun of those who panic sold around $10,000 back in 2018. They would regret having sold with how the bull run would push the price back to $20,000 before the end of the year. We all know what happened after that.

This story reminds me of someone I know that had a lot of luck for like a month or two (obviously assumed he was a pro), then ran out of it and rekkt himself.

I started out with trading making a lot of losses, which looking back now, I'm very happy with. If you lose when you start out you are pretty much forced to improve and continuously be wary of miscalculations that lead to more losses.

People who start out well and make a lot of profit don't have much reason to question their method of trading. Why should they? They're making money, which is why they are trading. The dark side of this is that when luck runs out, you will try to follow what made you profit initially, while not realizing that it wasn't based on anything but luck.

Fundamentals aren't really that relevant generally. It is that we have the block halving as fundamental event being important currently, otherwise the market ignores them all the time as we have seen back in 2017 on the way up and 2018 on the way down. The fundamental value is just the bottom to bottom development, the rest is driven by speculation.

If there is something fundamental that will force a change in the trend of the market, then traders will adapt and follow the new trend until that one reverses too.

Russian users of Bittrex started to get worried because of how Bittrex's new TOS addition focused on excluding countries that have been embargoed by the US. They probably thought that Russia as a whole would make it to that list too, but it has not. It is just the Crimea that is on their ban list. If you search for Crimea you'll see it pop up.

As for the 'international' sub domain of Bittrex, that is only for non US users. US users will remain on the regular Bittrex part of the platform. There are differences in token accessibility where international users can trade them, but US users not.

https://bittrex.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360001425926-Blog-What-Bittrex-International-Means-for-You