That's just their DDoS protection service. In no way does them using CloudFlare mean that it provides you a path to the opertors.

What matters here is that the operators could choose to leave at any moment of the day with people's funds they have sitting in their cold wallets. For the sake of people not losing their funds for ever (regardless of how stupid they are for using that exchange), hope that authorities won't locate where their actual servers are and seize the hot wallets in the process.

I'm sure that they have an escape plan ready just in case. It would make sense as well with how they operate.

The only way price fluctuations have an impact on confirmation times is when there is a sudden surge or decrease in price; people become more active where your transaction will get outbid by those paying a higher fee. In order to avoid these situations make sure you or the one sending you coins use clients supporting RBF (replace by fee) where the fees can be increased when needed.

It could also form a bearish decending triangle. The way Litecoin is being dumped down this close to the block halving makes it not entirely unlikely that Bitcoin will follow the same pattern. At the end of the day, it very likely has the block halving already priced in. I hope it's a bull flag, but if we yet again dip below $10,000 the forthcoming months might not be all that pretty.

Back in 2018 the decentralized triangle that played out turned out to be predictable to the degree where you could long and short pretty accurately. We'll see how it goes.

The software updates happen over-the-air. It's similar to you setting up your smartphone or desktop computer to download and install updates automatically.

To pay all you do is ask the merchant to pay with Bitcoin Lightning and they forward you a QR code, and from there you scan it with your smartphone.

I think you're mixing things up. The article mentions that whenever someone uses Lightning to pay for their stuff, the fiat that is forwarded to them by Fold is being put in the same category as giftcard/store credit purchases. I'm pretty sure Fold does this to gain a tax advantage.

The only thing governments can control is the centralized ecosystem around Bitcoin, not Bitcoin itself.

They have the ability to subject businesses to their regulations where data exchange is mandatory in order to remain compliant, and this might already be the case without people even knowing. I'm fairly sure that at one point governments will come out of hiding and penalize those who refrained from paying their taxes and whatnot.

People still put a lot of faith in Bitcoin's "anonymous" nature, while there is no such a thing as anonymity at all when you use centralized services. One day even the small fishes will pay the price for it when the amounts they initially didn't pay tax over added up to a significant enough amount years later.

It depends. In some cases you might be right, but investment bias is an extremely powerful element where people go really far to protect their incentives.

We are biased to shill the crap out of Bitcoin, but so are these Gold bugs to shill the crap out of Gold. I find most of their predictions to be quite delusional based on how much economical mass Gold has at this stage, but that doesn't prevent them from calling certain levels per ounce. I find it rather fascinating to some degree.

That being said, Bitcoin shills can be just as delusional as we have seen. Not necessarily because of $1 million per Bitcoin value, but more so the time frame where people expect it to happen.

Gold has relatively speaking been a good investment if you got in below $1000. It took Gold 5-6 years to break the resistance level that was preventing it from going higher due to all the (unbacked) paper shorts. Imagine how long it will take for Gold to break through its all time high. It might take decades without investors looking for a safe haven.

Also keep in mind that Bitcoin is a capable competitor that will usurp a big chunk of that safe haven capital. I wouldn't put a single penny in Gold unless you think all fiat currencies will implode and Gold is the only form of value that will hold strong.

What manipulation? I have seen a lot of people talk about manipulation, yet none of them can articulate what that manipulation exactly is they refer to.

The drops we have seen are pretty common. Most big stack holders that have way lower entry points are waiting for certain levels to be reached so they can sell and get back an amount they feel comfortable with. They tend to wait for higher levels because of the slippage that occurs. They factor in that in order to get x amount, the price has to be 10-20% higher because of how thin the books are.

It's easy for most people here to cash out their positions at exact price levels, but for whales looking to unload thousands of coins it's impossible.

Bitcoin up = altcoiners saying altcoin season will start when Bitcoin either stagnates or goes down.

Bitcoin stagnant = altcoiners saying altcoin season will start when investors have made up their mind.

Bitcoin down = altcoiners saying that it's natural for altcoins to go down when Bitcoin does.

I think things will change when average joes go back to their deluded state of mind where they think altcoins can lift them out of their boring joe life. I don't expect a global altcoin season, but a part of the altcoin space will surely bounce up at one point, which probably might bring us a new generation of coins/tokens taking over the garbage that currently seems to be losing public interest.

I always welcome more competition. It helps improving the services exchanges provide and also makes them cheaper to use for people.

It's likely the regulatory climate there starts to become stricter due to how governments slowly but surely catch up on the developments happening within their country. Especially in Asian countries capital control is a very big deal. Crypto makes it way easier to circumvent them, hence the governments there are subjecting the exchanges to strict regulations.

Another reason could be the insane capital gains taxes people in the different countries pay there. Depending on the country and the hight of profits, you might end up paying 50% of your profits straight to the government.

Doesn't really matter at the end. People are not allowed to use a service that's financed by other people's money, and not money that belongs to the bank itself.

People aren't allowed to buy crypto through credit, but are allowed to transfer money to foreign forex brokers offering products way more risky than crypto. Makes sense. 

It sounds so easy the way you put it down. It's not in reality. How do you seperate a shit project from a project that is legitimately trying to deliver a working product, while both the legit and shit project use the same marketing strategies (i.e. promising to change the world, be better than Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc)?

Another important thing to keep in mind is that even when a project is legitimate, has delivered somewhat of a working project, it might not end up doing well at all in terms of price action. Most projects that show 100-1000% gains are the ones that are shit. It will come down to selecting coins left and right and hope that your basket of altcoins will do well.

It really sucks that people don't care what they invest in, but this is the market we're participating in. It's you that needs to adapt and accept the climate here, the market already has.

For most people trading amounts of $50 might not make much sense, but we have to understand that there are also people for whom $50 is a lot of money, and that they trade with much smaller amounts.

Most exchanges have a minimum amount they require you to have in order to participate in the market. Bitstamp, an exchange that I frequently use, handles a minimum of $5 per trade, but this is an exchange for the more experienced traders/investors. Binance for example allows people to trade with a minimum of 0.0001BTC, which is like $1 at current rates. Depending on where you are from, this is probably the best exchange to use.

It's just regulatory pressure. US regulators are the most feared and they will not shy away from whooping your entire platform if you don't comply with their set of rules.

Binance is a mega exchange; it's impossible for them to hide like for example an exchange such as Yobit that doesn't care about anything. In that regard, we can only be happy that Binance is playing it smart, because US regulators have shown their teeth and don't shy away from seizing the assets of a non compliant exchange.

We'll see how BAM trading services (their US partner) will fare when it comes to regaining the US users that will now look for a new home.

What we have gone through is not manipulation, just the result of buyers and sellers dealing with little depth on both sides of the book. The wild fluctuations might seem like they are extreme, but they are perfectly normal. Did you forget about how we had similar volatility back in 2017 and even 2018?

$100,000 isn't that difficult to reach with how little supply there is. If altcoins boom alongside Bitcoin and stimulate people to use their Bitcoins to trade altcoins back and forth, it helps removing hundreds of thousands of coins from the main market and thus contribute to more spot scarcity. As always, the crash that will follow will not be pretty.  

$20,000 will trigger some extreme volatility. It won't be stable at all. If we break through the last resistance level, algorithms will go nuts, investors will go nuts. Traditional investors would consider it a 100% probability to bet on Bitcoin not breaking through $20,000 again. Bitcoin breaking that level will convince even these investors that it's here to stay.

Aggressive or not, if we do end up hitting that level the people desperately calling it will have sold somewhere between $20,000-$30,000 already.

Only if you have steel balls or be a hardcore hodler you will be able to sit on your coins to such levels. The far majority will be so tempted to cash out when they see 50-100% profits that they will lose out hard. It's a natural thing for those who sell to become bearish due to their bias to buy lower. They will burn seeing the price continue to go up instead of down. 

I can see Bitcoin's market cap dominance easily drop below the 50% mark in the future.

It's only a matter of adding enough shitcoins to your index. Right now on CMC it's Bitcoin versus 2200 coins, but that at one point will be Bitcoin versus +10,000 coins. It's an unfair comparison in each and every way, but people like it so it exists. This doesn't mean people will switch to altcoins, just that index sites such as CMC are going with the flow of the market to remain relevant.

CMC might list Libra too eventually. If they have like $5 billion of it in reserve, that's directly the market cap and it will lower Bitcoin's market cap dominance instantly.

That's not manipulation in crypto. Nowhere is that particular practice of trading referred to as such, and as long as that isn't the case these trades are legit.

People need to grow a thicker skin. Whales by default have the ability to move this market due to the thin orderbooks, but that doesn't mean it's manipulation. Also, "manipulation" to the up side is not a problem at all for people, just when it goes down. Makes sense right?  That to me is a clear indication that people still don't know when to enter. 

I don't think it's that bad. The thing here is that you should use what's convenient for you based on the situation you're in. One day that might be Bitcoin, the other day it might be fiat.

The fees are not so much of a problem. People who complain about the fees aren't spenders anyway. The main problem is that during a bull market, people don't want to spend something with a tremendous bias to he up side. If you spend like $100 worth of Bitcoin today, you'll regret it next week or month because the price rose by whatever large percentage.

Bitcoin is too precious to spend. Fiat depreciates in value and is easier to spend because you don't want to sit on it for too long.

It's not necessarily that these countries are a target, but more so that these countries are such a big player in the exchange market. There are so many exchanges there that it's quite normal for these countries pop up more than other countries in this negative aspect. Another contributing aspect is the rapid growth in that region where exchanges rush to go online but with lesser overall security unfortunately.

I'm not even wondering how people can be so stupid to leave their precious coins at an exchange. I know people are messed up in the head. They won't change.