The bear case is definitely possible and I'll get out of my long if turns out that we're heading towards lower lows. After what happened in 2018 I'm no longer taking a risk with my trades and shift whenever I see a change in the dynamics of the market. My gut feelings have been bearish for a while now, but the rational trader inside me just follows the charts, which is what I did.

As far as the calls of 123abc goes, I haven't followed his calls so I'll have to look into them, but even when taking everything else into consideration, we still follow our own route as to what we believe will happen (at least, that's how it should be).

Obviously, nothing happens just because Max Keiser said so. It's just an empty prediction based on geopolitical turmoil.

If people are tired of speculating they shouldn't be here. They chose to invest but lost, that's not Bitcoin's fault. Bitcoin has gone up from below $4000 to almost $14,000 this year.... If people didn't manage to benefit from that run even once, they suck.

If you bought in during 2017's bull run at +$10,000 levels, you could have lowered your average tremendously by buying below $4000 (which you had months for to do). If people did that they would be in the profit right now. Smart capital allocation is definitely not on people's mind. 

No. I'm legit referring to the fact that centralized entities have nothing unique to offer, and if they do, it's only unique until the next centralized entity delivers a better product. It's a cycle that we already see in the tech world, which directly is why people think Bitcoin will at some point be replaced, but they don't understand Bitcoin's value proposition.

I think the funniest part about this fed payment network is that the XRP army couldn't resist to shill their bags in the way that fed could be partering with Ripple.

Not in a hundred years will the fed use that garbage, where more importantly, you can create your own real time payment network by simply forking and improving existing protocols. I would say that initiatives such as Libra, JPM coin, Fed network, etc only lower the imaginary utility that delusional people think XRP has.

The moral of the story is that centralized protocols will always be replaced by a centralized protocol that's better. The sole reason this space has fundamental value, comes from the fact that we work with distributed ledgers. Everything centralized is utter garbage.

I'm glad that with Bitcoin we can support our own form of money, one that can't be taken away if taken care of the right way. We can't and shouldn't expect governments to turn honest, but we can expect them to at least have some more respect for the people now they have their own money that can't be taken away from them.

In some states you can even pay your taxes in Bitcoin. Sure, it's still going through a payment gateway as we speak, but this is a first important step in the right direction, where the next step could be that some states will choose to accept Bitcoin directly. It would mean that governments take it serious enough to not have it converted to fiat and therefore value it above their own fiat currencies.

It tells me that if people and businesses no longer have an incentive to accumulate fiat to pay their taxes, and there is no payment gateway inbetween to sell these coins back to speculators, fiat's "intrinsic value" will be taking a massive hit since it is just a believe system.

I think that is what can and should be expected from a business with eye for profits. As much as I respect Blockstream for what they have done, I am glad that their 'dominance' in terms of developer commits has taken a massive dive. Most of the commits nowadays come from Chaincode Lab's developers.

I think the real bummer move from Blockstream's side was that they defended Tether while we all know how questionable their business model is. I'm pretty certain that the motivation behind that move was to protect their Liquid client.

It's going to be super interesting in the coming 10ish days. If we keep moving sideways, and respect the ascending trend line that has been there since April, it might offer a helping hand to confidently push above the descending line as seen in your screenshot. I strongly believe that given the trend, we will make higher local highs.

I converted my short into a 2x long and I'm ready for the next leg up. People might consider 2x boring, but no wick will stop me out. There are no certainties of course, because we technically haven't seen a high local high yet, but given the current trend it's kinda foolish to be bearish for too long.

Not in full, but partially is perfectly okay. I think the main problem is to convince a non crypto or tech employer to buy in Bitcoin and pay you out. Too much hassle and too much risk of complaints. It's much better if you allocate like 10% of your salary to Bitcoin on a monthly or biweekly basis. It's not that difficult to transfer money to your exchange and buy Bitcoin.

As far as the price going down goes, that's just profit taking and that what we may have seen, was just a fakeout. Currently we seem to be consolidating.

Bitcoin definitely needs to become more user friendly. It's quite easy to explain people how the basic features such as send and receive work, but things get tricky when you explain them how important network congestion is, what the difference is between one single input transaction versus multiple, the security aspect, etc.

People don't know what it is to be responsible for their own wealth. They don't know better than banks doing the work for them. It gives them a peace of mind, and I can't really blame them.

PayPal's fees might be the same when it comes to domestic payments, but definitely not when you transact with people from different countries. They seem to be fairly dynamic as well because they change quite frequently without PayPal coming up with an explanation. Very unreliable in terms of fees, and similar to extortion since they operate an closed ecosystem.

The volumes are still 'just' $5 million per week at their peak, so it might not be totally a threat yet for the government, and we don't know how much of this volume consists of speculation to benefit from the fluctuations. You still need Bolivars or dollars to buy food, pay bills, etc.

Mind explaining how people using Bitcoin as store of value weakens their national currency further? For every person buying Bitcoin with Bolivars, there is someone accepting it. It's not that the "utility" of the Bolivar declines because that would require people to no longer accept Bolivars for their Bitcoins, which isn't the case yet.

I already did and from time to time still do just in case they for whatever reason allow people to withdraw the balances that were deposited before the policy change.

That makes little sense since you are not enjoying any privacy when using centralized services.

It's definitely not pointless because this is a simple yet very effective way for exchanges to be on the safe side of the fence, legally speaking.

The tricky part about circumventing IP blocks through VPN's is that when Bitmex or any other platform put your funds on hold and forces you to verify yourself, you're pretty much toasted. You not only violated the platform's terms, but in some countries it's a criminal offence too as stupid as it may sound.

If you don't ever plan to verify yourself on these platforms, you effectively should only deposit amounts you are willing to lose. If the day ever comes that they do require KYC/AML verification, then you can just exit. It will suck for a while, but your private information is worth more. The alternative is to not use these platforms at all.

The policy change came last year. I have like $5 worth of Bitcoin sitting in my Coinbase account that I with a high degree of certainty have donated to them because I'm not going to KYC verify myself. I never used Coinbase to buy or sell anything, it was just so that I could send Bitcoin through their centralized ecosystem for free to dozens of other users.

You don't need a custodian wallet. Search for Electrum wallet in the PlayStore. Make sure you only download the version listed by 'Electrum Technologies GmbH'. No phone or KYC bs, and you fully own your private keys.

If you are looking for a custodian wallet for the sake of sending free transactions within their ecosystem, then I don't think there is a service offering that anymore, especially not without KYC.

Bitcoin's highest one month gain this year so far has been ~85%. 

You can actually have a bull run within a bear market, but the thing is that people with some sort of a bias against Bitcoin will always find a way to be bearish. Charts can be made to look super bullish or super bearish depending on the narrative you're pushing.

I am actually more appreciative of the bearish predictions than the bullish predictions because we already have so many moon predictions. Too bad people here are calling everyone with a bearish mindset fud spreaders or trolls. If my memory serves me well, Kwukduck has been the only actual fud spreader and troll we had. Too bad he's no longer active because it was very amusing seeing people go nuts on him. 

I don't see very strong resistance of governments against Bitcoin. In a nutshell, as long as Bitcoin isn't forming a direct threat to their fiat currencies, which it currently doesn't, they will not try to stop it through legislation. Bitcoin's digital Gold nature is perfect to have it grow further. It will be a useful tool for governments as well.

Constant manipulation? How? Where? Can you list one actual fiat to Bitcoin exchange where this manipulation is happening at? The only obvious form of manipulation happens on unregulated shitcoin exchanges through wash trading and altcoin pump and dumps.

So many people complaining about manipulation yet not one single breakdown of what this manipulation is.

I'll convert my short to a long within two hours from now if we don't get a sudden crash. It will be the first actual daily close above the descending wick to wick peak resistance line. My gut feelings say we're still not out of the woods, but I'm following the charts and not my gut feelings, which is how it should be.

I would say that November/December historically have been great months to actually start taking out profits, regardless of the price. Bitcoin is a poor performer in Q1 of each year so there is a fantastic opportunity to stack up more satoshis, which is what I will be doing and so should others do.

Are you seriously thinking about why they didn't choose stablecoins over Bitcoin? What's the point of holding stablecoins as "safe haven" tool (which are pegged to the dollar), when you can just hold your REAL dollars? On top of that, stablecoins lose purchasing power just as much as the actual fiat currencies they are pegged to. It's a horrible "safe haven".

Also don't forget the added counterparty risk of holding stablecoins over the counterparty risk of just holding dollars in your bank account.

Bitcoin just came out of a nasty bear market, which makes it super interesting to buy into because it allows you to claim your position to ride the next bull wave that's coming. Combine super bullish charts with people more and more respecting Bitcoin as a digital Gold, and there you have a solid reason to allocate funds to Bitcoin.

Lol. You do realize that Bitcoin's price is directly a reflection of how much fiat dollars you get for it right? If you are being paid out in Bitcoin, your salary is basically $1500 worth of Bitcoin, set at Bitcoin's fiat value at that specific day. You will no longer be a 'slave' when everything is priced in satoshis and not fiat dollars.

Your bank gives you a piece of mind in the way that you have a certain percentage of your wealth in a centralized ecosystem that's pretty much impossible to lose due to hacks and whatnot. I never had a coffee/grocery payment censored at all. It works perfectly for day to day payments and bill settlement. Not everything requires decentralization.

Is it manipulation that makes the rich richer, or are they just smarter with their capital allocations? I go for the latter.

I have around 75% of my net worth in Bitcoin. I get why people think it's so dangerous and whatnot, but people who have been early enough had the opportunity to enjoy the massive ride up. It's just that the wealth in Bitcoin throughout the years has massively outperformed the wealth you have in fiat, and this will continue until Bitcoin has reached its whatever near million price.

If it wasn't for Bitcoin to have outperformed the fiat net worth of OG's, they wouldn't have that kind of allocation to Bitcoin, because no one with a rational mind is pumping half (or more) of his wealth in an asset, regardless of what it is.

Of course they do. You just can't know how much security is enough until it actually gets tested, which in this case lead to a breach of their system. NOW you know it wasn't enough, which they have put a lot of resources into to fix, so currently they are more secure than before, but only until the next breach.

Binance isn't the type of exchange to save cost on security. They as the ONLY large exchange have quite a solid support desk, which can't be said about Coinbase and other exchanges of that magnitude. This costs a lot of money to keep running, so definitely not the type of exchange to save cost elsewhere.