Actually, Ether has done exceptionally well. What people seem to forget is that it's trying to find a way to be relevant even without ICO's. Forget the $1400 all time high, that was solely the result of the ICO hype. Current value of $300 is more than decent and quite bullish for its holders.

As far as CMC's dominance index goes, it's so flawed that I only want to say that they keep adding coins to their index, which by default decreases the dominance percentage, even when Bitcoin and altcoins haven't done anything value wise. Bitcoin's market cap dominance dropped by 0.7% some days ago because CMC added Bitfinex's LEO token to their index.

It's Bitcoin versus 99.8% scams and the rest are projects with some fundamental value.

It might be a bit different this time. I don't think we'll ever see the altcoin space as a whole boom the way it did back in 2017.

It will be more like a lottery pool where you have to buy plenty of tickets and hope that one of them will be the winning one. With so much institutional interest in Bitcoin, more institutional on-ramps, it's difficult to imagine that altcoins will be shining as a whole. What happened in 2017 was extreme where the emergence of Ethereum played one of the biggest role.

Another thing is that with more demand and platforms offering high leverage trading there is no such a thing as boring anymore. Even without wild fluctuations you can make trading in Bitcoin as wild as you want it to be by applying leverage.

If you're all for regulation then there is no such a thing as a step too far.

Governments more than ever are out to obtain as much of your infomation as possible, and they won't shy away from using ugly methods to get what they want. Bitcoin threatens the control they had for a long time through the banking system. Now there is a decentralized way to store wealth outside the banking system they have to adjust their game plan.

Governments care little about scams and shady activity on exchanges. It's being used as an excuse to take away as much of your freedom as possible. You having financial freedom and a certain degree of privacy is more harmful to them than a bunch of con artists stealing people's money.

That's definitely an option, but the decentralized exchanges that do offer fiat to Litecoin pairs are very illiquid, which might result in paying extreme premiums. And then there is the question of how decentralized your trade is when you use a centralized financial institution to transfer the fiat from one to another account.

OP just needs to walk himself through the verification steps on an exchange as Coinbase Pro or Bitstamp once, and from there he can buy and instantly withdraw at any time of the day.

For nearly two years now actually.

I think it's safe to say that Bittrex is dealing with incompetent owners not understanding the line between what's still allowed and what isn't in order to remain compliant and not break any laws themselves. In order to make sure they don't mess up, they disable accounts left and right because of how paranoid they have become.

It's difficult to motivate people to read the TOS, but it really seems that you can no longer avoid doing so in current times. The crypto ecosystem has changed.

Eventually we really need them but for now it shouldn't really be a problem to catapult Bitcoin to levels dwarfing the current $20,000 all time high.

What we have going for ourselves is that Bitcoin isn't at a stage like Gold yet where it suffers from all the cash settled instruments suppressing the spot price. With LedgerX, Grayscale, Bakkt, ETF's, the OTC and the spot market will dry up because there are only a limited number of coins up for grabs.

The severity of slippage on exchanges will only increase because wealthy individuals have to buy up the price in order to obtain a large number of coins. The liquidity that's waiting to buy will lead to less slippage to the downside because there just aren't enough coins to sell through the buy side of the orderbook. The future looks bright. 

I wouldn't really go for properties with how it's hard to move out of. Bitcoin is the first choice (yes I am biased) where stocks would be my second choice. I'm not particularly a fan of Gold's market activity because it doesn't give you the bang for your buck that Bitcoin or flashy tech stocks give you.

Liquidating physical Gold here yields a 3-5% below spot price when selling to a pawnbroker, jeweler, etc. You really need to find a private buyer willing to pay spot for your Gold, which requires you to place an ad on a site which might take a while to sell, and with the demand for physical Gold declining it's only going to get worse. It's not attractive at all. Stocks on the other hand are easy to liquidate from within my banking portal.

I think the aim shouldn't be to wait for the government to do something to improve the situation over there. You can't expect a rotten government that has scammed every citizen of that country and made the far majority of the population become so poor that it's hard to make ends meet. Fuck that government.

People's should aim at building up local economies themselves, and this to some degree is happening already. There have been local initiatives to issue their own paper currency, but this is obviously prone to fraud and not a viable course of action long term speaking. I wish that Bitcoin was further in adoption and fundamental development to onboard these people, but we're still far away unfortunately.

Bitcoin is a fantastic hedge but not a great local currency for daily use. It's too expensive and too volatile even though their own native fiat currency has seen more severe volatility swings, and nearly all to the downside.

It shouldn't come as a surprise that when the price rockets up with 20% in one single day, which is a shitcoin level pump, that it tanks with the same or even higher percentage.

The block halving is like 11 months away from here so just keep holding your coins and use the lower price (if you have fiat left) to scoop up some more coins to lower your overall buying price. I am strongly of believe that this is a healthy correction and we're going to break through the resistance around $14,000 and shoot well past it.

13 years old? May I ask where you bought your coins from? Most exchanges doing KYC/AML level verification have age restrictions in place to prevent people of your age to use their platform.

Dream big. Aim at $100,000 which shouldn't be that much of a problem considering how young you are. By the time Bitcoin hits that price target you have more economical experience and a better state of mind when it comes to utilizing the wealth you have managed to built up.

Experts? Most "experts" you see pop up nowadays are clowns trying to surf on Bitcoin's success because their own career has taken a slump.

It's common sense that if you blindly buy at X price to sell at Y price that you are gambling. No need for "experts" coming out and say that.

I haven't sold a single satoshi from my cold wallets in probably 4 years. Not even the runup to $20,000 back in 2017 was enough to convince me to access my cold wallets.

In order to benefit from this market's wild up and down swings I have a number of coins that I solely use to long/short on Bitmex to accumulate more satoshis. Great thing about Bitmex is that it pays you out in Bitcoin too, regardless of what coin you long/short. This way I can still benefit from how wild this market is without even thinking about the coins in my cold wallets.

$20,000 is nothing but a future bottom of a potentially long lasting horror bear market.

That reminds me of how someone I helped into Bitcoin became so cocky due to a few profitable trades, that I was merely a bump on the road for him trying to prevent him from making profits, at least, that was his experience. I did my best to convince that person that his profitable trades were lucky shots, but how do you convince someone of that? He even said that I insulted his knowledge, lol.

As expected, the dude ran out of luck and came back apologizing about his short journey as "pro" trader. He got into trading because of a few random TA fools on youtube and followed their instructions. How stupid can one be?

The chance to buy may have only passed if you're letting the price increase scare you off. At $5000 people also thought they were too late. $6000, $7000, $8000, etc.

You got to respect the trend for what it is and let go of that 'I'm too late' mentality if you want to buy but think it's too late. People have had enough time to buy below $4000 but didn't do so because they don't have the balls to buy something that has gone down like 50% in a month or so. People feeling bad about having missed the boat have only themselves to blame for.

Good option to still benefit from this bull run but not go big is to allocate 25% of your capital to Bitcoin if you haven't bought already. If it goes up you are at least part of the bull run, where if it goes down you can add more to your position at a discount, and this lowers your average entry point too.

I doubt that unless the demand has increased by such a degree that $10,000 forms some sort of a fundamental floor.

If we look back, Bitcoin has always been generous offering people a second chance to buy at certain lower levels people don't think are possible to reach anymore. This doesn't mean that we will go back to $4000 or $5000 but a revisit of sub $10,000 levels is definitely not impossible. I would say that a price between $7000-$8000 is still realistic once the momentum runs out.

Of course, people don't want to hear anything about going back to sub $10,000 but you got to be realistic. Being a moonboy works against you more often than it helps you.

People have said that also when we broke through $6000. I think this is how markets are; the more people expect the price to crash or correct, the less likely it is that it will happen.

This really seems an institutional driven bull run, and they are here to add to their positions for now before the floodgates open for real. People looking for a correction to buy up will have to beg non institutional whales to unload their coins, but given how strong the trend is, this is unlikely to happen. Even if it happens, buyers are ready to buy the price up in a matter of minutes.

It sounds to me that there is a compatibility issue with the wallet you imported your private key. What client did you use?

I personally generate my (Segwit) private keys through Bitcoin Core, which I trust the most. I'm too paranoid when it comes to using websites to generate a paper wallet.

I'm not sure how fancy you want your paper wallets to look, but writing your private key on a piece of paper will do it. Laminating your paper wallet afterwards is recommended for more durability. This is how I have been doing it for years. It will require you to install Bitcoin Core but it's definitely worth it if you aim at using the most trusted client software there is.

In that sense you can just as easily sue wallet providers who are shit at estimating the right fees for their users. Or blame speculators who overpay by 100-200% even when the fees are much lower. Sue BitPay, Blockchain, etc for not upgrading to Segwit which unnecessarily makes people using their services and directly the rest pay higher fees.

High fees shows that Bitcoin's economic model works. Fees increase the way they are meant to increase. Why make a problem out of something that was set in stone on day 1?

Awesome news! We badly needed to counter the demand for cash settled CME contracts by having a trusted entity within the space offer Bitcoin backed contracts.

I hope for Bakkt they have their shit together now they plan to test launch next month without regulatory approval. The only way for this to fail is to have the CFTC stand up and put a stop to their plans. If not, they are operational. If the CFTC ends up blocking it there is something fundamentally wrong with Bakkt.

2.0 futures refer to being a Bitcoin backed futures product where CME and CBOE only offered cash settled futures.

It seems that these legacy entities have taken too many steps at once without understanding how Bitcoin works and how important being a custodian is. Good job of the CFTC to force them to improve their operation, which means whenever they launch, the product they offer should be safe enough to use, and very likely insured.

You need regulatory approval because you're basically a money transmitter like this. I don't know if the firms behind these ATM's have a money transmitter license, but if they don't and grow too large, they'll be taken offline in a hearthbeat I would say. Operating as illegal money transmitter is subject to severe penalties.

In some states obtaining such a license and renewing it can cost you like $100,000 a year. It may partly be a reason why the fees are so high, but that's assuming they have that license.

How do beginners not pay attention to volume? People tend to go where the rest is, and high volume is an indicator that an exchange is heavily crowded.

Even if volume isn't what beginners pay attention to, exchanges on CMC are ranked by volume by default, so from there they will automatically go for the ones at the top. If exchanges cheat with their volumes, they don't have any problems cheating on you by blocking your account, slow down withdrawals because they operate a fractional reserve business, etc.

I'm just pointing people at the risks involved so they don't run into problems, but if you guys want to follow CMW anyway, then you're all are free to do so.