I can. Bitfinex and Tether.

Gox was one weakened exchange, albeit a heavily loaded one. Tether has spread across all the alt markets too as well as driving BFX. The rise from $1000 coincided with the explosion in USDT being issued.

Bitfinex has a history of creating junk tokens, talking out of their ring piece and never answering straightforward questions. Maybe it'll all be fine. I'm far from convinced. The parallels with Gox are screaming in our faces.

It makes far more sense to do it with a machine that'll never see the internet again. You can get something that'll do the job for $20. If you ever do need to access the internet again with it just give it a comprehensive wipe.

It's far more reassuring doing all your crypto stuff on something you know can't possibly leak.

5% of the world getting in would probably push the price into the high tens of thousands or more.

There are maybe 10-20 million people involved now, and that might be extremely optimistic. That's 0.13-0.26% of the world's population.

I believe Kraken is an option too for small amounts.

I wouldn't enter one of these exchanges fully expecting to stay ID free forever though. There are endless examples of people having withdraws frozen until they provide docs.

You're playing on their platform and their rules. Eventually no ID will be a thing of the past everywhere other than decentralised options. The Man is closing in.

So does anyone suspect BCH is a ploy to preserve BTC mining profitability too? There'll be a drop in difficulty and if BCH limps on they may be able to keep a lid on BTC difficulty for a fair old while.

This may well be a bubble, but it's absolutely nowhere near the dotcom bubble. It'll be a footnote in history compared to that.

The dotcom bubble sucked in an army of institutional investors, funds and private individuals. At present crypto has barely sniffed a cent of the real money out there. It's still the province of outliers and weirdos despite the noise.

As for the original question, I'd say USDT's dollar backing being properly questioned, tested and failing would be the catalyst for a monster of a fall. That's underpinned Bitcoin's rise and the alt bubble and it was put together by a bunch of ramshackle blaggers with a track record of concealment.

Surely the moment to do this was 2009, not these days. It doesn't matter how many devices there are, they'll be outgunned into oblivion by industrial operations.

It will perhaps start to make sense again when the block reward is far lower and the main benefit of mining is collecting fees but even then it'll probably be fully corporate by then.

Indeed. It's ever so slightly fishy that this run started off almost to the minute that their USD banking ended and the amount of USDT started swelling from $10 million to now well over $300 million.

They keep going on about 'institutional investors' moving 7-8 figures daily in and out of Tether. What 'institutional investor' in their right mind would deal with a company with that track record and Tether's terms and conditions? They've outright said that they bank like criminals, ducking and diving to stay ahead of everyone.

It's going to be worse than Gox if it turns out to be true. Bitfinex has a habit of killing rallies either through incompetence or outages. This one might be their crowning achievement.

This is a relevant thread - https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/6uarbw/so_whats_the_subs_opinion_on_this_finex_and/

There's a BFX employee on there who basically doesn't address a single concern with anything resembling facts.

http://bittybot.co/uk/buy-bitcoins-uk/

According to that you can do it with Coinbase, inside Blockchain,info, Bittylicious, Coinjar, Safello and some nutter on Localbitcoins charging £11,000 per coin.

Click on the 'payment type' bar to filter it.

It just goes to show how far there is yet to go when there are still entire countries only now getting their first ATM.  And according to that there are six of them on an entire continent.

So what? Do you really think market cap means anything at all?

Reaching that price is down to a few thousand sellers and buyers on a handful of exchanges. Nothing else commands the price.

And the rise from $1000 was probably created by Bitfinex pumping it with non existent money anyway.

This is an interesting question.

Bitstamp claim they're regulated across Europe with this - https://www.bitstamp.net/payment-institution-license/

Which I've never heard of anywhere else. Ever.

EU should be harmonised but the demise of Localbitcoins in Germany only suggests that might not be the case.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=886598.0;all

Kraken operates everywhere but it also seems they don't give much of a shit about regulation. Maybe you should contact the main EU operations like bitonic.nl and bitcoin.de and ask them.

There've always been miners. The difference between now and the early days is that back then miners were also users. That's not really the case any more and never will be again.

It's a sorry, but inevitable, state of affairs. If there ever is to be a 'Bitcoin killer' addressing centralisation will have to be the number one priority.

I've suggested a bigot sub forum in the past where people can hate on womenz, jews and benders amongst their like minded friends. It wasn't taken up.

Is there really any point in asking this any more? It's as baked into its fabric as google translate posts, and dishonesty.

Assume everyone here is anti semitic and bake a cake for your local rabbi.

So are there any rumblings of them working on Segwit? They don't seem to be the most communicative of people at the moment. I fancy becoming a cool kid.

I didn't know John MacAfee married a hooker who appears to be even more out of it than he is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxuxNFtsrCU

Good luck to the pair of them anyway. I truly wonder where his life will head next.

By then there'll be an app where you can summon one of her drones to erase you for a modest fee.

I think we'll have to wait for Malia Obama to become president before that happens. Or Snoop Dogg.

It's about to be listed in Korea. They're the new king of degenerate pumps. Expect a fine fall once they've had their fun.