How has Bitcoin exactly failed in this case? If a custodian has so much user funds under control, and it starts censoring transactions, then people themselves have failed because they didn't understand that you don't own any coins when you don't own the private keys. It's super simple.

Xapo has billions in client funds locked up. The clients will have to beg Xapo to release the funds but may be presented with a no or some other lame excuse. Did Bitcoin fail? Nope. You can't blame Bitcoin for people's own stupidity. You always have the option to say no to a custodian, but if you decide to use them anyway, then you will have to face the potential consequences of that.

Isn't going to happen. Most of the 'research' people conduct is based on searching through Google whether or not there are withdrawal problems and whatnot.

If an exchange doesn't accept users from a certain country they aren't forwarded a registration or login page. They see a message stating that they aren't allowed to use that specific exchange. I haven't heard yet of an exchange not accepting users from X country but still allows them to register. That would be pretty odd, don't you think?

Agreed. If you're using a centralized exchange and make gains, then definitely make sure to pay due taxes because it's not worth it to later have the IRS point you at it (and when they point you at it they don't do it in a friendly manner).

I have a speculative stack of ~10% and a hodl stack of ~90%. My hodl stack hasn't touched an exchange in years and won't be doing so in the forthcoming years. I'm not going to pay one single penny in tax over my hodl stack. My speculative stack is where I do pay tax over the gains and whatnot. It sucks, but there is nothing that can be done against it as long as you keep speculating on centralized exchanges.

I think it will lead to a healthier market with less pumps and dumps. Most serious buyers of Bitcoin in the US are using either Coinbase, Kraken or Bitstamp. No one in his right mind loads up on Tether and sends it to Binance. Their USDC vs BTC volume hovers around $10 million (give or take) which is a much closer reflection of the interest in Binance from US users.

But yeah, this might also function as extra stimulator for people to look into the peer to peer market, because when an exchange does what you want it to do, there is no reason to look for an alternative. They have that reason now.

The worst thing is that they might keep the perks granted to them by Visa to themselves, which means that they scoop up the fees plus whatever the perks are that Visa grants them.

I have never been a fan of these debit cards because they don't offer much of an advantage over my own that I can use pretty much anywhere within Europe already, and that for free. People complain about banks being suckers, but they do offer quite a useful service, while financial institutions such as Visa and MasterCard are known to suck you dry by charging ridiculous fees.

This Coinbase card will have to appeal to a very small pool of potentially interested users. I wonder how long they will keep it up with low demand.

I think the main problem with people "trusting" him is that we're dealing with a continuous wave of new users who may have heard about him years ago and think he's a guru or something. That's also why there doesn't seem to be an end to all the noobs asking whether or not cloud mining is the right investment for them.

In both cases it concerns fraudsters, but hey, he's doing what he does the best and we can only continue to warn people about his shady practices.

They at least know how to run a business and seem to favor Bitcoin, which is a good thing. DCG has been the first wealthy entity that has put money into promoting Bitcoin over Gold with their recent drop Gold TV campaign. Usually you only see this happen with shitcoins, but now Bitcoin is actually reaching mainstream TV. Pretty solid if you ask me.

In the end, regardless of who we are talking about, there is always an agenda steering whatever entity to follow a certain path. Big money is involved so what else can you expect?

They will not. These government bodies thrive on uncertainties because it makes shutting down sites and services much easier. If they're clear with their rules they basically become obsolete because most businesses will follow them. Just look at how unclear the IRS (or basically any other tax agency) is with its rules. It's kept like that for a reason.

It's a shame that a country stating to be the country of freedom does everything it can to choke anything it deems a potential threat. Fuck this. Business will move elsewhere eventually. I'm so glad that I'm in Europe despite all the problems here. The banking system here works more efficiently and cheaper too.

Coinbase has done everything it needed to do the right way and pretty early on too. Thumbs up for being smart business-wise.

I think they will really go for it. The way I understand how this approach works is that Bakkt will launch without an approval, but can only be prevented from launching when the CFTC steps in and puts a stop to it. If the CFTC doesn't move an inch, Bakkt will successfully launch and they can finally compete with the CME by offering real Bitcoin futures.

Bakkt has made some progress with their recent digital asset custody company acquisition. We'll see if that's enough or not, but I'm pretty confident in a launch.

Binance has always known this was going to happen at some point. They did all they could to play cool so that they could gain ground as aggressively as possible.

It's going to be interesting to see how many of the US folks will end up walking themselves through KYC to use Binance. Most people use that exchange because it was one of the very few ones left offering a ton of coins and a ton of liquidity without verification. This could be a bummer for altcoin pumps and dumps but a good thing for the ecosystem since less liquidity will flow in trash coins.

I don't follow your logic.

Fees are meant to compensate miners for the lack of block rewards, which means that the lower the block rewards are, the higher the fees will be. The block size won't likely be getting a bump in the forthcoming years, but the demand for it will continue to grow due to more user adoption, so you better expect a significant increase in transaction fees.

How is it a win for the borrower if the borrower has to spend more to just pay back the bank its Bitcoins?

It only adds more risk and cost to the side of the borrower. One way or another, there is always one party that's losing if you deal with a loan in Bitcoin. Also, it's not even sure that the bank has won when the price has gone up because it depends on the borrower to pay back first, and by the time the debt has been settled, the price may have corrected again.

It's more likely that loans will be handed out in tokens like Tether. You can print them whenever you want or just do it based on the demand for them, and there is way less risk involved for both parties.

I think the block halving effect in terms of percentage gains isn't the way to look at it. Litecoin could easily pump over $200 in the coming weeks when fomo kicks in. People just buy because they see the price go up, so even if it has gone up like 500% already, people will still jump in hoping to make profit.

Bitcoin will not pump as hard because there is so much more economical mass to move. The good thing about Litecoin pumping is that it tends to have a positive effect on Bitcoin which then goes up with it. If we see Litecoin pump over $200 I'm certain that Bitcoin will at least attempt to break the $10,000 level, and we still have plenty of time ahead of us until the block halving.

December has proven to be a month where it's better to short/sell Bitcoin and wait a couple of months to buy back lower.

The thing with people expecting a correction is that they think it has to be 30-40% to finally have it be confirmed. It could still be that the price will correct with these numbers, but that might also be well above $10,000 and then bottom out somewhere around $7000-$8000. It's impossible to figure out when this correction will take place.

It feels much better just looking at the price action without having a specific bias. If it goes up I'll benefit and if it goes down I'll benefit too.

Why would you 'take advantage' of such an event? Even if such an error (or whatever it was that caused the machine to freak out) happens again, it's not your money. It belongs to the company behind it and you are even committing a crime if you keep the money. It's called theft, regardless of how innocent money laying on the ground may seem to you.

How would you feel if this was your ATM and thus your money that people were picking up off the ground? You would want them to return it to you, right? 

Greedy banksters can only dominate when sheeps don't understand the difference between what's good and what's bad. If we put that aside, we also have to deal with people who just don't care and only aim to use that what offers them the greatest deal of convenience. Banksters are everywhere as long as there is demand for their services, and currently there is plenty.

People won't even shift if decentralized exchanges work almost as good and convenient as centralized exchanges. The difference in convenience and user experience needs to be exponentially better to have people switch to decentralized exchanges.

That depends on what level you consider a confirmation of a bear market that has ended. For some people that may have been the $6400 level, but for others that might very well be the psychological $10,000 level. If you're very strict, you could even say that the $9000 wick might have even been a lower longer term high, so as you can see, it's a very subjective matter.

To counter the above, you can also look at the all time charts where each year represents a candle, and there you can see what we never really had a bear market. In other words, you can make charts look as bearish or as bullish as you want them to be by playing with different time frames.

What it probably comes down to is that their banking partner doesn't approve certain actions from the user side. This basically means that Coinbase is getting rid of you to please their banking partner so that it doesn't result in a closure of their own bank account(s). In other words, Coinbase is nothing but a slave here and they abide by whatever the bank they are working with tells them to do.

It's probably so hard to find other banking partners that they rather dump off a small number of users to not run into problems themselves.

Probably because it's their biggest competitor, and they are part of Barry Silbert's portfolio. He is the CEO of Digital Currency Group. Barry can continue injecting money in Coindesk until they find a way to work around the change in Google's algorithm, or until Google adjusts it so that it doesn't affect sites as dramatically.

CCN is just a shit operation. If you don't have enough of a buffer to survive for at least a couple of months, you don't know how to run a business, period.

Volatility affects even the most regulated exchanges such as Coinbase. Volatility is a side effect of how illiquid this market is. No amount of regulations can prevent price swings without investors having enough confidence in the exchanges to provide buy support to Bitcoin. Investors are rightfully worried about their funds that sit in their exchange account.

We need legacy institutions to offer trading desks so that there is a trusted environment for investors and traders to provide liquidity to a market badly in need of it. It's not for nothing that legacy institutions such as CBOE and CME and even Fidelity are the biggest ever entities in the financial world. They are being used because they have a proven trackrecord of being secure and competent.

Fidelity's crypto trading desk will be the first test in that regard. We'll see how it will provide more liquidity to this market and what effect it will actually have.