I think that makes a lot of sense, especially when you take into consideration that the same tactics were used to get him off his CEO seat. In that regard, who is the bad guy? It's pretty much fire against fire and there isn't much that the regular employees can do than to accept being used as collateral damage.

https://www.blockchain.com/pools

Bitmain is losing the battle as most dominant entity within the mining space and that's a great thing for Bitcoin. I hope it will stay like that, but the problem is that you never know what else fills up that gap. It's great seeing such a toxic company lose power slowly but surely, but what if the competitors are even worse?

Highly questionable. As always, technicals make or break an asset's trend. Gold has been trending up nicely for a while now and it happened to break out around the same time the situation in Iran escalated. People love to connect dots between large price movements and events that happened around the same time.

I'm pretty sure that I can find an event that happened in the world and link it to pretty much any increase or decrease in the price of Bitcoin.

What could happen is that institutions might purposely act based on certain news events, but only to steer the price to the direction of the trend it was in already.

What big companies exactly? Also, if people are aware already of the big companies that will release their products this year, then it only means that these events are priced in already. In other words, the less people know, the less likely it is that they are prepared for whatever it is that will happen. Usually a great counter trade opportunity for contrarians.

I honestly do not expect much from the price at all this year. People are so focused on a bull run and a new all time high that it makes me become more conservative. It took people to almost literally give up on Bitcoin when it fell to low $3000's for a bull run to commence. The more bearish the general sentiment is the more confident I will become that there will be a bull run.

I read an article about crypto traders on Twitter finally getting bullish again. That instantly made me become more bearish. 

It's the perfect recipe for failure.

The whole point of crypto is that you verify, and not trust. How can you verify that Brinks actually has enough Gold in its vaults to back up whatever Gold backed crypto? I don't want to trust on an "independent" entity doing the verification part and they then release a report that says they are backed. If I can't see that they are backed myself, their words hold no value.

Bitcoin is Bitcoin. You can verify everything easily and fast with how transparent this whole system is. Why go back to something we try to get rid of?

https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactions.html#6m

Transaction volume on-chain is actually going down slowly. Not sure what gave you the impression that it doubled, but that's simply not true.

https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/ethereum-transactions.html#6m

Ethereum transactions saw a decline in the same period as well, which is indicative of how poor the sentiment is. People are more active when prices are going up then slowly exit when the price doesn't want to go up anymore.

That's right yes. Blocks are built on top of other blocks, but since there is nothing to build on top of, the genesis block needs to be hardcoded into the software.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Genesis_block

I find it actually cooler that back in the days CPU miners were also full node runners. There weren't many transactions to confirm, but at least everyone had control over what happened with their hashrate. Nowadays people mining at home are a slave of the pool they point their hashrate to. No say in anything. The pool decides what transactions to confirm and what transactions to ignore. 

I hope they continue speaking out against Bitcoin. It only makes them look bad because despite these powerful bimbos not liking Bitcoin, we are still heading up and become stronger fundamentally speaking. It's free marketing. In fact, it's somewhat of the best possible marketing. The same applies to Peter Schiff who has become a counter trading indicator.

People shouldn't feel so attacked each time someone is saying something about Bitcoin. All you do is show how triggered you are. I recall Warren Buffett even pointing that out. It feels good seeing that Bitcoin is still facing heavy resistance from all sides, that's how you know you are still an early bird. If everyone welcomed Bitcoin with open arms it usually means they're in.

I wouldn't really consider Huobi and OKEx to be the best exchanges.

In the more recent times quite a bunch of the PlusToken scam coins have been dumped on Huobi and a chunk on OKEx, and that not once, but multiple times. How come these exchanges don't freeze their funds? They probably are making a killing allowing these scammers to dump on their exchange stealing liquidity from the ecosystem.

Both exchanges have KYC policies in place, so they know exactly who does what with these coins. I wouldn't recommend anyone to use these exchanges. Steer clear of them!

Even bigger red flag; http://whois.domaintools.com/minery.io

Domain expires today. That says enough about the people behind the project. They don't care anymore, or they have performed an exit scam.

Gave me a good laugh. 

---

This domain isn't worth more than it's registration fee of ~$10. I'm not trying to sound rude, but I can register plenty of better and more professional looking domains, and ones that are super brandable too. The very fact that domain hoarders haven't registered that domain is a telling sign that it's not really special. Honest talk.

I have seen a lot of people thinking to have registered a super duper premium domain, but the reality is that it's not premium at all, and even if it was premium, without a working product behind it it's not worth as much as people think.

It's simple. Every subject that is even remotely related to Bitcoin (in this case an influential person mentioning Bitcoin), will be used by news outlets to spin up an article and shove that through people's throats. I am not surprised about it and kinda understand the business model behind it, they just want to generate as much volume as possible, which in the end brings in the money.

People need to calm down and just ignore articles they deem unworthy of reading. Spend your time better by reading articles that you do like.

The 'ban' never really worked because I still saw reports of people seeing ads promising people 1000% in 30 days, or this or that ICO is going to take over Ethereum, etc. It banished most of the legitimate ads, but scammers as always find a way to circumvent the policies and get their scam ads to become visible.

In fact, it made things worse because when the far majority of the ads left are scam ads, the pool of potential victims falling for them increases significantly due to the legitimate ads no longer being visible. It was bound to be reversed because the whole policy makes shit sense when all you are left with are scam ads while your plan was to get rid of them.

As with everything related to investments, it all comes down to your time of entering. Gold two days ago broke $1600 which is a 7 year high, but it's still under its $1900 all time high. Those who bought into the 2011 Gold bubble and held on to their Gold have wasted a lot of time and missing out on a lot of yield. Thinking that its safe haven status will save you from massive declines is false.

Bitcoin and stocks have been the shit to get into in the last decade, Gold clearly not. It's important to spot the differences in the trends amongst assets to not miss out. Being so attached to an asset that you don't want to sell it is understandable, but it usually doesn't work out well for your purchasing power as the Bitcoin/stock charts clearly show.

Peter Schiff isn't all that different from perma bull Pompliano in the sense that they always think it's a good time to buy no matter how bearish the market is. People should pay less attention to what they say and do more research themselves.

It's not that old school. I see more and more people actually wanting to participate by running a full node. Most people obviously aren't here for the fundamentals and thus don't want any of that hassle, but the few who do actually want to run their own node are the ones that add more value to the network than all of those combined who don't run a node.

In the end, you don't want people with no idea of a full node the run one or mess around with a Lightning node. They have no clue what software to run or how to verify the signatures of the software they plan to install. Most people are so stupid that they probably Google 'Bitcoin full node' and then click on the first site they see to install their crappy/scammy software.

Also, downloading the blockchain isn't that big of a deal. The main time consuming part is validating the data.

Or artificially inflated searches. I recall having seen that happen back in 2017 as well, where shitcoins nobody cared about paid people to search for that shitcoin with terms like 'how to buy x coin', 'what is x coin', etc. It wouldn't really surprise me if something similar is happening here, but then a bit more professionally executed.

This space is still largely unregulated and you can get away with artificially inflating statistics quite easily. With how easy it is to convince a bunch of noobs that something is trending in the searches, there is a lot incentive for big traders/investors to deceive them. There is no shortage of dumb money in this space, even when they think they've learned from their previous mistakes.

It's more sad to see people here take him serious. McAfee has been a scammer and a compulsive liar for a long time. What else can you expect from him? You can't expect from a scammer and a liar to not scam and lie. It's the nature of the beast. He is on the run for the authorities too because he has done a lot of shady shit outside the crypto sphere as well that raises many eyebrows.

In the end, this type of behavior is common amongst those who got rekt. At the beginning they own a lot of Bitcoin, then lose it through leverage trading and all their are left with are their altcoin bags. Similar thing happened to Richard Heart recently. They shill that what they own the most of, and the coin (Bitcoin in this case) they had plenty of but lost, is going to be trashed whenever they see an opportunity.

I can't wait for another crappy ICO with an even crappier name to emerge and pay McAfee to have a tattoo of their logo on his body. Would be perfect.

It depends on what your definition is of the speculative investment phase being temporary. If we look at other legacy assets, they are mostly used for speculation. If there is no speculation, there is no liquidity. Bitcoin will eventually experience less volatility, but that doesn't mean people will stop treating it as a speculative investment. Nothing wrong with that.

Forex volumes globally easily top $10 trillion a day. If there was no speculative demand these volumes wouldn't be what they are today. People should stop looking at speculation as an obstacle or bad side effect of how new this space is. It's amazing what we see happen within crypto as we have new wealth distribution happening in front of our eyes.

They can surely fail but that doesn't mean the platforms you mention will impact them. I don't think it's a good goal to aim at any service to fail, mainly so with how more competition between services is actually a great thing for every user. It yields better quality service at a better price point. How can you not like that?

In the end, there is a niche for every service to serve. Those who don't mind KYC verification will stick to LBC, while those who don't want any of that will use a service that doesn't ask for your information. I however have yet to see how long such services can stay operational with more regulatory pressure forcing services to either comply or shut down.

Well, it's not a failed rally until we give back what we gained. In this case it's actually quite bullish to see the price pull back a bit because seeing the price go up like this is unhealthy. You want support to be built over a fair amount of time, which we haven't been able to do with such a rapid surge.

We are not far away from a bullish cross between the 21EMA and the 50EMA on the daily. Last time we were about to cross the price dumped hard preventing the cross from happening. I would consider this a failed rally if it happens again. Then my target would be very low $6000's.

Gold is pulling back too. It fell from $1611 to now $1550. Utter joke for Bitcoin, but for such a liquid and high market cap asset as Gold it's a big deal.

Fomo will start well before that. I'm pretty sure that the institutional buyers (institutions are technical buyers/sellers) will fomo hard when we actually see the price do something it hasn't done in a long time, which in this case is change trend and mark a higher local high. This also explains why we pumped so hard from $3000 to $14,000 in such a short period of time.

The fomo that will start when we break the all time high is going to be retail driven. They will buy the coins of the smart money on the way up until they run out of funds and smart money no longer provides any support. This retail fomo will very likely cause another altcoin boom and they will end up getting rekt just as hard as the last time.