It sounds more like they're beinhg DDOS'd.

Any error page starting with 50x means the servers are overloaded - so 504 errors or 503 errors mean that the server is overloaded. Whereas error pages starting with 4xx mean the page has been removed by the website owner.

So the problem is external, they're under attack. Whereas exit scams are internal - the owners of the site simply shut it down and leave.

The American economy is still recovering from the Great Financial Crash. It needs to consistently grow over 4% per annum to generate enough tax revenue to close the deficit.

Unfortunately it's growing at about 2% per annum. I think Trump managed a couple of quarters at 4% but growth then slowed again. They're not helped by the rest of the world - Germany for example is growing at 0.5% per annum, which is near recession - it's stagnation. Until everyone is growing fast, there is no hope of any government reparing it's finances.

He's basically a nutjob and a fantasist and he believes his fantasies because he badly wants to believe he is Satoshi.

I don't know why people are giving him so much attention though. They should just leave him to mutter by himsef and maybe hope his wife gets him some professional psychiatic help.

A lot of people lost money buying at the top. If we ever get back to about $20,000, we shall see these people cash out with relief, so it might be hard to push past that point.

Bitcoin has had a helluva ride, but the past is not a guide to future performance. The only way the next decade will be as good is if there is continued work to build the ecosystem around bitcoin.

Ripple took a hit when Congress started attacking stablecoins (which was prompted by Libra).

Congress is now putting through a law called "Stablecoins are securities", and this threatens Ripple's whole business model:

https://eng.ambcrypto.com/ripple-exec-slams-stablecoins-are-securities-act-claims-libra-accelerated-crypto-talks/

Zuckerberg and his Libra project have managed to undermine the whole stablecoins niche.

I think it's only for amounts over $3000 that you need KYC. See

https://bitpay.com/blog/bitpay-dashboard-id/

D tube is built on top of the Steem network.

So after you have uploaded your Dtube video, simply post it on Steemit. If people like it, they'll upvote and you'll earn Steem.

I disagree.

I think there will be a pump up to the halving, and then the price will drop. So if you can sell at a profit, do so. You can always buy back again at a lower price after it has dropped.

The people who sold at the top in 2018 at around $17,000 and then bought back at around $4000 are in the money. The ones who held simply watched a paper profit disappear. Always take some profits.

There was quite a lot of material progress in 2019. Price was around $3500 at the start of the year, it's now about $7,200. So double. One of the best asset performances across the world.

That's pretty good progress. If we end next year doubling again at $14,000, that will be extremely good progress too.

Bakkt was a damp squib. Most people simply ignored Craig Wright. As for hacks, they happen so often, again no-one takes any notice.

Libra was the big event of the year - because it upset governments and started them thinking about regulation. Govts were not threatened by bitcoin or the other alts. But they hate the idea of stable coins which are pretending to be backed by fiat. And they hate Facebook and Zukerberg. So the two things coming together was explosive.

Agree. Ethereum got really badly hurt by the ICO clampdown by regulators across the world. Prior to that people were buying ETH as a prelude to participating in those ICOs - and that's why the price was high. There isn't really any reason to buy anymore.

It might be an issue in that particular part of China, but the Chinese brought it on themselves by offering extremely low electricity rates to miners (which is the reason mining got concentrated in China).

In other parts of the world it's different. Iceland's electricity is entirely geothermal and they've got a lot of miners too. And parts of Europe are developing an excess of wind energy and miners are benefitting from that too.

Everyone knows this. But traders like to move the price on "news" and sometimes fake news is concocted to try to move the market and persuade newbies to buy.

Also - there are keyword trading bots that automatically buy when the words "china likes bitcoin" appears in the news. They also sell when "china bans bitcoin" appears in the news.

It's mainly happening in China - but the Chinese seem to be allowing some of these companies to default to make investors more careful about whom they lend to. See

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-26/china-s-government-is-letting-a-wave-of-bond-defaults-just-happen


They had corporate debt defaults of $130.7bn in 2019.

Not realistic at all. Remember that the internet was designed by the US military to ensure that communications couldn't be taken out by a single point of failure or even multiple points of failure. The packets of information just re-route from node to node till they get to the recipient, even if they have to go the long-winded way around the world to do so.

So say someone cut the cables going across the Atlantic. The info would then route through the Mediterranean into the Red Sea, into the Indian Ocean into the Pacific Ocean and get to America that way. To criple that system you would have to cut all teh cables and assume that govts won't be able to fix the cables as fast as you can cut them.

The bigger threat is lack of electricity - but again, because countries regard this as a core feature, they will defend their electricity generation at all costs. Even Venezuela still has electricity.

There have been proof of stake coins before which have crashed. Remember Reddcoin, Dash, Hyperstake and hundreds of others that popped up in 2015 and 2016?

They sort of died because you needed a huge amount of coins to get a reliable stake, and so the small holders sold up deleted their wallets and moved on.

It sounds very much as though they are speculating. It's hard for them to give out cryptocurrency unless the people they give it out to can either spend the crypto, or convert it into fiat in a local exchange so they can then spend the fiat.

Actually you can earn much more on D Tube than on Youtube, because you get paid in Steem from people upvoting your content (the steem allocated is basically what's being mined in the seven day period the video is up).

Whereas Google pays a few cents to a few lucky people who manage to get people not to skip their ad.

Germany is experiencing negative interest rates, and positive inflation. So of course people are rushing to buy gold. Their economy has also stalled - so I guess if a recession appears it will be in central Europe starting in Germany and then spreading to the countries that sell them parts (Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Czechia).

In my opinion, it's deader than a dead parrot.

As long as Facebook wants to locate Libra in Switzerland rather than the US, while still trying to use dollars to back Libra, the American regulators will do everything they can to prevent it's use in the United States. And if it can't be used in the US, it's useless. Might as well use bitcoin, or litecoin or doge or some other cryptocurrency that can be used in the US and doesn't break any laws by pretending it's backed by dollars.