Price up = analysts and experts expect prices to go up further.

Price down = analysts and experts expect prices to go down further.

I haven't read one worthy bit of analysis coming from any of the more 'popular' news outlets. They probably ride the flow of the market so that they have something to report regardless of what the prices are doing.

In that sense, speculation as a whole offers an infinite source of content and news outlets know how to tap into that source. It's not that I blame them since it's a business that needs clicks/views, but they at least coud do their best more.

It's definitely a great form of marketing to have a $200 billion market cap company allowing people to pay with Bitcoin. Sure, it's through a third party payment processor, but it's still a more than welcome event.

I hope that they understand who the different groups of people holding Bitcoin are, because if they expect a surge in revenue just because of this, they will be faced with a big disappointment.

I have seen in the past where companies blame the volatility for ditching Bitcoin (which is nonsense because they use a third party payment processor), but we all know that not enough revenue (if any at all) was being generated.

In my case that's already happening. The city I'm living in booked a positive net result, and that without excessive taxation, while the country as a whole is performing considerably worse.

Local governments are much closer to the people and the local economy than the politicians are trying to figure out what the heck is going on with the country as a whole. It's quite a shitshow to be honest, and the situation hasn't changed one bit.

If local governments are easily outperforming the rest of the country that's lead by a bunch of idiots totally disconnected from the average person or the economy, then why not look at what they do right and adopt the changes?

Maybe not for you, but for enough traders it is profitable. Every minor price movement can be a worthwhile scalp with leverage. How do you think a boring asset such as gold is being traded? Leverage is key.

Why do you assume that people speculate with their entire coin stash? In most cases people's speculative coin stash accounts for less than 10% of their total long term hodl stash.

As for the 'real' bull run you're talking about, it can't get much more real than going from $4000 to $8500 in a short period of time. Your 'real' bull run definition is probably based on a 500-1000% increase.

It's easy if you're buying into Bitcoin believing in its long term potential, but that's completely different for most people here because they don't know the difference between Bitcoin and an ordinary shitcoin.

People aren't investing or trading, but gamble with nothing but hope being their main driver. It's not for nothing that a lot noobies here rehash the same nonsense where they point at positive thinking being the most important factor.

I wish it was that simple. I would be a millionaire if positive thinking was the path to success. 

Who has free electricity? Certainly no large mining farm. I remember having read articles about how students abused their university's electricity to mine crypto currencies, but they have been penalized for that.

Free electricity is scarce and if it isn't you generating it, you are subject to fair use policies which nowadays have prohibited mining and whatnot. Mining is a tough industry to be in, and I'm glad I always sticked to buying Bitcoin directly.

Throughout all the years, simply buying Bitcoin has always outperformed the returns that mining Bitcoin has generated. The same applies to investments in start-ups in return for a % stake.

People don't seem to care anymore unfortunately.

I have seen how people on social media point out that they don't believe that Tether is fully backed, but use it anyway because it offers them the convenience and usability they are looking for.

As long as Tether remains the most liquid and widely used/accepted stablecoin, nothing will change for the better I'm afraid. Its first mover advantage will make sure it stays on top for many more years to come.

Another thing is that exchanges don't have much incentive to promote other stablecoins because of how much volume Tether generates for them, so it's not looking all to good for people hoping to see the situation change.

I by default would avoid sites such as BTC.com considering how they are doing their best to promote Bcash over Bitcoin, and that mostly in an unethical manner that affects newbies not knowing what's good or bad.

Coinbase was pretty decent until they started asking for your ID in order to use it. I have been using them for like two years prior to their policy change, and it always worked just fine for me. Too bad they went full KYC/AML.

Currently I'm using Electrum and don't see much point in using an online wallet anymore. The good old zero fee days are over and that means they don't offer a worthy to join advantage anymore.

HitBTC is known to artificially up its trading volumes. No one with a large enough BTC stack is messed up enough to use this exchange. It's purely a noob driven exchange using it because of the shitcoins they have listed.

The artificially inflated volume numbers are the result of sites such as Coinmarketcap that rank exchanges based on reported volume, which is the most stupid thing to do because it's a metric they easily can manipulate without a penny in cost.

If you look up the traffic stats of most Asian exchanges participating in artificial volume inflation, you'll see that the nr 1 traffic provider is Coinmarketcap. In other words, manipulation pays off....

I think if we go to test $6000 it will fall apart effortlessly just like how we blasted through the 2018 support effortlessly this year. $5000 is still possible in my opinion and it would be a higher low on the charts.

Nothing is certain here, but I would dare to say that $3xxx prices won't be seen anymore if Tether doesn't implode taking the whole crypto market down with it. That's the only risk I see in the mid term.

Short term speaking an implosion of Tether will turn this market in a war zone, but in the long term it will add more credibility to the ecosystem and we have gotten rid of a massive point of failure on top of it.

Another benefit is that you're granted another chance to buy at much lower prices.

How do you know? Just a guess? If the bottom is actually in, which I'm sure not many people doubt anymore, the multi year bull run has already started. It could speed up at some point, but that's something you can't time.

The only thing that matters is to keep holding your coins and to not get excited too early. Most people sell their coins during the first 25-50% increase, which they end up buying back at higher levels because they regret having sold.

I must admit that it isn't always easy holding through price increases, but the initial 25-50% profit during a bull run is peanuts compared to what you can have simply by being patient.

I'm sure he does. $400 million for an exchange that lost its whale traders to Bittrex is an absolute joke. Circle very likely bought it with the intention to make Poloniex reach its glory days as top exchange.

Poloniex was the shit during the rise of Ethereum. It easily did 100k BTC just on its BTC/ETH pair, and the rest of the coins they had listed did over 100k BTC combined in volume on top of it.

Over 200k BTC in volume per day means a shit ton of fee income. These guys must be sitting somewhere on an island drinking tequilas all day, and I can't blame them for doing so. Circle rekt itself there.

People need a stable currency day in day out. Bitcoin just isn't a viable option unless it's to store a large portion of your wealth (that you don't directly need) for a longer period of time.

I have read about how some local governments there have issued their own paper money, and it seems to do a pretty decent job for those holding it, but when you want to enter you still depend on the value of the national fiat currency.

If you also add that Bitcoin's fees have seen a significant spike, it once again becomes clear that this isn't a viable alternative as day to day currency. $1-$4 fees is what some people there earn in a whole day.

Everything is functional again when it comes to deposits and withdrawals, so go ahead. The only 'issue' they're dealing with right now is high server load, but that's being worked on as we speak.

I don't think we should ever assume that there is something truly anonymous here. TOR has proven to not be, and so do crypto mixers not offer you that benefit. It sucks of course, but we can't do anything about it.

BitMixer very likely felt the pressure coming from all sorts of agencies and pulled the plug right on time to avoid ending up like BestMixer. I'm glad that I sticked to ChipMixer, but this is definitely a warning signal to pay attention to.

In my case 10% of my monthly income goes straight into Bitcoin, which I feel very comfortable with. It's significant enough for me to build up a nice position over time, but not significant enough to cause problems.

Mental comfort is a big deal. The less you force yourself to do things you shouldn't do, the less stressful the bear markets become. People always freak out because they have gone too deep with money they couldn't miss.

As long as you don't over-invest or take out a loan, you'll do just fine. These are the most common mistakes people in crypto make. Accepting that crypto is a volatile asset class helps a lot too.

Bitcoin might be limited, but what if governments build an unlimited fiat token like USDT on top of Bitcoin? It will still allow them to print money out of nothing, and debt will still be part of people's lives.

If they don't want to build on top of Bitcoin they can set up their own centralized network. Governments can benefit from this crypto revolution just as much as we do, which some people haven't really thought about yet.

Another thing is that people love to buy things they don't have the money for, so even with all the best intent in the world, if people themselves don't stop buying things with debt, it just won't stop debt at all.

Supply and demand kicking in again. There is what seems to be an endless demand for debt, and there is a lot of fake money in circulation to meet it, and in case there isn't enough in circulation, more will be created to even it out.

It really seems so, especially when you take into consideration that we haven't had much resistance between $5500-$6500 at all. The price broke through these levels effortlessly.

I would have expected that the levels that provided so much support last year, would turn into major resistance this year, but not at all. The price ignored the indicators and volume profiles and surprised many of us.

Currently there seems to be a bearish pattern playing out with a fairly high probability of going back down to low $7000s, but even if it does correct to that level, we're still up like 100% from the bottom.

Such a non event. It was an attempt to have BSV pump hard with capital coming from Calvin and a bunch of other mentally challenged scammers. It went up around 80% where these scammers bought their own coins on the way up.

I think Craig and Roger have done a lot together to have people (unfortunately) somewhat meme the Bitcoin white paper with how they constantly refer to it and see it as the absolute definition of Bitcoin.

It's sad to see that there is so much drama going on here, which is completely different when it comes to altcoins. Ethereum for example doesn't have to deal with this nonsense despite the large number of competing platforms.

Bitcoin needs bigger base blocks, which we should have had back in 2016/2017 already. I'm not in favor of super large blocks like what Bcash currently rocks, but a jump to 2-3MB with SegWit on top of it would be neat.

People in some cases literally wait for the fees to come down in order to transact, and I think that really sucks. Also, in order to onboard more LN users you will need larger base blocks anyway. The longer you wait the harder it becomes....