I'm pretty certain the guys over at ICE know how to attract institutional investors and have them use their platform. Most of these platforms (e.g. CME, Fidelity, Ameritrade) have a following of institutional clients, pension funds, family offices, etc.

I don't expect them to match CME in terms of volumes, especially with how it had enough time to build up clientele, but it's going to be in the hundreds of millions every week once they got up and running, that I am sure of. I don't think LedgerX will be able to do that, but it's still fantastic news to have them on board.

I don't think it's a good idea to use a safety box inside a bank to store your private keys and whatnot. In that case you are no longer the owner of your coins, but the bank is. It's pretty much the same as when you allow an exchange to hold coins on your behalf.

Using a hardware wallet such as the Ledger Nano S is perfectly fine when it comes to storing your coins. It's small enough to hide it pretty much anywhere inside your house, and even if someone manages to find it, there is still a PIN they need. The recovery seed requires no effort to hide effectively.

Meh. It doesn't matter whatever so called experts/gurus/analysts, etc, are saying. The only thing that matters is that you prepare yourself for what is going to happen in the coming 12 months. Every person with a few functioning brain cells should understand that we're currently forming the perfect setup to obliterate the $20,000 all time high.

It technically doesn't even matter if you prefer to wait for a dip or a confirmation that the market is breaking past the $14,000 where it was brutally rejected from a few days ago, all because of how paying a few thousand more or less isn't going to make a difference when we're blasting past $100,000 in the forthcoming years. Prepare for a nuclear price explosion.

Yes. People complain about the price going up too high too fast, but this is the sort of thing you want to see after a bear market. Bitcoin always corrects back to more appropriate levels before heading back up again, but these are usually the moments you should buy the dips, especially with how the market is trending up.

The block halving fomo hasn't even started yet, and I am strongly of believe that it will blast the price well past the $20,000 level before the last 12.5BTC block has been minted.

More bullish news; After LedgerX, the CFTC has also approved the Bitcoin backed futures by ErisX, which is backed by TD Ameritrade.

It's waiting for Bakkt now.  

I have seen local news channels pushing headlines that Bitcoin broke a new criminal record.

It's mind boggling how stupid people can really be. It's one thing to be ignorant when it comes to Bitcoin's technical aspects, but it's a completely different thing to be ignorant about what money is being used for what illicit purposes. These news outlets would be on the brink of imploding if they wouldn't have governments and corporations sponsoring them with dirty blood fiat currencies.

What is this 2013? Just fuck off.

Not entirely impossible. I wouldn't mind one major shake-off before we go back up again, but with how difficult it is to get a clear picture of the market, I'm not sure what to expect. It doesn't happen that often for me that I prefer to stay neutral for the time being, but this is a case where I will be neutral. If charts look ugly, confusing, that means one thing..... Hodl.

Fundamentally speaking, with the block halving coming closer and closer, I will look to make use of whatever levels we will crash to in order to stack up satoshis. I do expect the $20,000 level to be broken through before we actually see the event take place. Don't let this current correction distract you. Don't feed the whales.

Old news, but more importantly, very good news because CBOE no more listing fake Bitcoin futures means that people can't short Bitcoin without owning any coins themselves.

Liquidated shorts, which isn't anything surprising with how the price went up to levels people wouldn't be able to guess beforehand. Bitmex has had hundreds of millions of short liquidations before. It's not an unusual occurrence.

It's impossible to time hashrate shifts causing block times to slow down, but I have to say that while it's not entirely uncommon, it doesn't happen very often that there aren't any blocks found for 2 hours.

In all my years here I have never had to wait for 2 hours to see a block come through for my transactions. In general, some times you get like 3 confirmations in 10 minutes, and some times no confirmation in 50-60 minutes. Luck is definitely a factor.

I wouldn't say 51% attack on low hashrate altcoins are rare. There is a lot happening in the altcoin space that news outlets don't pick up, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't happen.

I have seen altcoins have an in-built 'exchange' feature where people can trade from within their client without a third party, but that would be something that's not really convenient to do with Bitcoin due to the fees. I think that Lightning will be a major game changer in this field with how you can exchange funds in an instant and at almost no cost.

People have to understand that development of these non profit features is very slow because it cost time and money for developers to work on this. Give it a few years.

It goes way further than tax evasion and malpractices. Governments are desperately trying to regain the control that they lost by restricting the centralized ecosystem around Bitcoin as much as possible. Financial freedom doesn't stop with Bitcoin being decentralized and them not being able to seize your coins.

The main thing is that our transaction history in Bitcoin and other crypto currencies will dictate how much freedom we will have outside the Bitcoin ecosystem. You still use a bank account right? Or PayPal, MasterCard, etc. One transaction to an entity they don't like might result in you being dumped off their service and potentially others too if these institutions share data with each other.

Coinbase is dumping off users from its platform because they withdrew Bitcoin to a service their banking partners don't like. It's only a matter of time before they will dump you off their service if the address you deposit coins from contains transaction activity between you and a party their banking partner doesn't like. It's a teaser. Prepare for worse.

There is no such a thing as total privacy in crypto unfortunately, and as I have said above, it's not just about tax. I would suggest for now that you split your funds into wallets each with its own purpose (e.g. one as cold wallet, one to use on a daily basis, one for the coins you speculate with, etc).

The goal is to not signal to centralized entities that your daily use wallet is linked to your cold wallet and vice versa. All we can do at this point is minimize the amount of data governments will be able to extract from us.

It's easy to combat when you just like Bitmex process withdrawals manually due to there not being any hot wallets. After so many hacks I expected more exchanges to stop working with hot wallets, but it seems that they don't want to stop offering people the convenience of cashing out near instantly, and it will require a little more work in the background.

People want the convenience but blame the exchange for not being secure after a hack. After a hack however people suddenly would wish the exchange didn't work with hot wallets if they had the chance to go back in time. 

Enlighten me as narrow minded being, what matters more?

This is the second time you say that what people are willing to pay for it isn't all that matters, and yet you haven't explained what it is. Go ahead.

There is a difference between fiat in physical cash form and fiat we spend through centralized institutions.

Fiat in physical form is what allows people to obtain the highest degree of privacy with how transactions are peer to peer, and not recorded on a server or ledger. This is what enables criminals to do whatever they want. This is how governments finance wars, buy weapons of mass destruction, etc. It's the ultimate form of money for both good and bad use.

What you are talking about is fiat people spend through centralized institutions.

You have been here long enough to know that what he have seen in the last couple of days isn't strange at all.

It's definitely not market manipulation, but the aftermath of a brutal rejection from a very important resistance level. You know what's strange? People don't complain about manipulation when the price pumps with $1000-$1500 in a matter of hours, but when the price goes down like that it's suddenly a problem.

A lot of these larger price swings are fueled by long/short squeezes, and when the market is already wildly fluctuating, it can look a bit messy.

The market has done everything to indicate that the bottom is in with a very high degree of certainty. I don't blame people for being optimistic, but there is no valid point yet to be extremely bullish either. If we look at Bitcoin's history, it has always been very generous even in bull runs by providing people a second chance to buy lower.

I think people got blinded by the parablic increase and thought the price would shoot past the $20,000 level with ease. It's something we see when the price is going down as well, people always tend to exaggerate regardless of what direction the market is heading to. Price up is moon next month where price down is Bitcoin back to sub $1000 next month.

People wondering why they are wrong all the time should do the opposite of what they think should be done. Easy way to be wrong less often.

He just stated how things are. The speculative nature is indeed dictating price discovery, how is that narrow minded? Bitcoin is worth what people want to pay for it, and speculation is a big part of that. Miners might jump in to support certain levels close to their break-even point, and stop selling, but if there are more speculative sellers, the price will go down anyway.

I doubt he wanted to paint Bitcoin off as something only being used to speculate with, but what he said is the reality.

That was super odd. At first they praised it because it (according to them) did everything better than Bitcoin. Not too long after that they for whatever reason (my guess is that they sold their coins) started referring to it as BCash. How ironic is that? It really surprises me that these hosts are given that much freedom.

CNBC is also very much anti Tesla for whatever reason. They don't let an opportunity go by without trashing it. What a bunch of creeps.

No XRP shill army bots were harmed during the collapse of the Bitsane exchange.

News outlets don't care. They just pick the data as a large number and create a sensational article around it.

Most people using blockchain.com don't do that to buy or sell coins, just to use them as a wallet service. From there they send their coins to Binance or whatever other exchange to trade or sell. No one in his right mind will be using blockchain.com to sell coins. People care about every penny so they will send it to other exchanges if they have the intention to sell them to fiat.

Nowadays blockchain.com is a redundant service. Switch to Electrum or Green Wallet. Much better alternatives and both native Segwit ready.

It could very well be that this miner was a young nerd playing around with his laptop back in the days and now reached a point where he is going to buy a house or somethinig.

These old movements should function as evidence that coins not moving for years aren't lost or whatever. There have been articles where 'research' pointed out that this or that many million coins are lost, but that doesn't have to be the case as we have seen here.

Most altcoins that offer faster and cheaper transactions can do so because there is no demand for their block space. If 99% of your block space is not being used, sure, your transactions will be confirmed quickly. I do however have to point out that fast and cheap transactions don't mean they are safe. Most altcoin chains can easily be rolled back, attacked, etc.

People need to understand that most altcoins are being donated value and liquidity because they are paired against Bitcoin. Without Bitcoin the majority of the altcoins wouldn't exist, and those that would exist would trade for pennies. With governments cracking down on non compliant exchanges altcoins will be under fire even more, especially the more exotic ones.

In the end, with Lightning there is no reason to complain about 'slow' and expensive transactions anymore. Try it out and see for yourself.