No amount of research will be enough to get naysayers to drop their Bitcoin is an environmental disaster narrative. Another thing is that Bitcoin is still a waste of energy to them because it's worthless. It's burning energy for nothing.

Only when these naysayers will be driven into a corner by their government or banks they will start to appreciate the escape that Bitcoin offers. I think it's only a matter of time before this happens, and they will take back all their words. The beauty of Bitcoin is that regardless of how much people disliked it at the very beginning, they are always free to adopt it.

I honestly don't care about what Satoshi designed Bitcoin for. I respect him for inventing Bitcoin, but Satoshi's vision, nor the whitepaper isn't law.

I only care about how it benefits ME and there is not one single entity that can tell me what to or what not to do with my coins. I support anybody's right to use Bitcoin, regardless of me linking people or certain businesses or not. The fact that they can use it shows how powerful this technology really is.

My primary usecase for Bitcoin is a decentralized store of value. Fiat does its job well locally as cash, so the incentive to use Bitcoin as cash is pretty low. It is however a great internet currency. I no longer have to use a bank that takes days to move money from one account to another. I can do that with Bitcoin fast and cheap and that 24/7 every single day.

Bitcoin has never been worth $0 not even when it was being traded by just a few thousand people around the world back in the early days. Even without Bitcoin being listed on an exchange it at least had some form monetary value.

We're at a point where if countries ban Bitcoin, it will more than ever stimulate peer to peer transactions, and governments are aware of that. Instead of being stupid enough to ban it, they'll try to find a mid-way 'solution' which is to regulate the market.

The fact that you don't seem to understand that shows you little you know about Bitcoin or the state of the whole movement/ecosystem.

That may be true, but Bitcoin is not as easy to pump as it was back in 2013 and 2017 with how there is so much more capital that needs to flow into the market right now. The more economical mass Bitcoin has, the harder it is to move up.

In order to hit a price between $200-$400,000 we need institutions to go nuts on Bitcoin. Retailers alone won't be enough anymore. A coin backed ETF would help attract billions in fresh capital, but we're probably still years away from having the SEC approve one. Good thing about that is the fact that people can still accumulate at fairly reasonable prices. 

Nope. History provides the evidence that we don't need fast and cheap transactions to pump hard. It also shows that Bitcoin doesn't need to be used as a means of payment. It just has to go up and the herd will jump on it because they love buying Bitcoin when it goes up. They don't buy it when it goes down, while that usually is the best time to buy.

People don't care enough about the technical side to have it be an important aspect to either invest or not invest in Bitcoin. Just look at how altcoins without any fundamentals pump super hard. IOTA during the previous bull run pumped to insane levels with a broken network. No one noticed that until exchanges stopped accepting deposits and withdrawals.

Years ago I thought that most altcoins would disappear because of them not having strong fundamentals, but I have been proven wrong on that. They will stay alive as long as there is enough speculative demand.

It depends on what you consider to be the worst that may happen according to you. In my opinion that would be Tether imploding or a major bug in the code leading to x negative outcome resulting in a massive selloff. Both are temporary events that won't affect Bitcoin in the very long run. I would even say that they present people an amazing buying opportunity.

As long as we don't have a lot of cash settled futures platforms I'm sure that the spot demand will drive Bitcoin easily past the $100,000 level, and that's just a conservative guess. If you think about it, it's not even that much of an achievement at all with how it's 'just' a 13x increase from current levels. One massive bull run is enough to reach that level.

The fees being insane is just because of how little use and competition there is. Most of the ATM's require quite an expensive initial investment, and the businesses behind them operate these to make profit, and not to provide a charitable service to people. What I think will be the end of the extremely high fees is when there is enough demand for these ATM's that businesses operating them compete with each other for users.

I think it's reasonable to think of the fees dropping to 1-2% eventually, while right now they vary from 5-10% which is a complete ripoff, that I agree on.

Why not walk in and ask if they are willing to accept Bitcoin by explaining the advantages and how cool it will be seeing a Church go with the trend?

Churches generally generate most of their income through donations, and how cool would it be to have an extra donation option? I can see how people instead of declearing taxes over some of their profits, they donate it to a Church and may even be able to get some of it back because in some countries donations to charities are tax deductible. I'm not sure if a Church can be seen as a charity too (might differ from country to country), but it wouldn't hurt to look into it.

Introducing them to Lightning might even lead to a large flood of donations just because people love playing around with it.

I don't agree with that.

The whole reason that people have less economical freedom is because govenments pop up everywhere trying to dictate every aspect of economy and life. It's way easier to spread Bitcoin adoption without governments than with governments. If it weren't governments with their harsh regulations slowing down technological advancements throughout the last decades, we would be way further in terms of progress right now.

Governments are corrupt and lack the understanding and will to allow something like Bitcoin to gain ground rapidly.

This remind me of something a Gold bug said, which directly contradicted Gold's "usefulness" as money in these situations. The dude said that you can spend Gold anywhere. When he was asked how that is possible, he said that you can exchange your Gold for US dollars in a pawn shop or a jewelry store, and use the US dollars to conduct the purchases. 

I couldn't believe how delusional that dude was. The money in this case is the US dollar, and not Gold. All he did is point out how useless Gold really is as money.

It depends on where and how I trade. If I trade spot without leverage, I am not using a stop loss. On Bitmex where I trade with leverage I do use the stop loss feature because there is way more risk attached to my trades now. Spot trades don't lead to liquidations, while leveraged trades on Bitmex do.

Bitmex is a bit shaky from time to time with mass liquidations happening out of nowhere, that's why I am a bit more flexible on where I place my stop. I'm usually going for 20% in either direction depending on the trade. 1-5% is what I consider too tight and will easily lead to a trigger. Despite Bitmex's thick orderbook it's still a thing to take into consideration.

Not sure where you got that from, but even if so, if the mass expects the price to go up by whatever period, it's going to increase the probability of an opposite move.

Being a contrarian pays off most of the times, and we have seen that happen twice in less than 12 months time.

The first time was last year before we broke the $6000 level. People were confident about that level to hold and were expecting a bull run to happen. We got a massive correction instead.

The second time was this year before we got that pump to the $5000 level. People expected much lower levels, and some were even speculating about sub $2000 to be a realistic option. We got a massive pump instead.

Why is it not clear? Countries don't specifically have to adjust their taxation rules to crypto and mention the asset by name. It technically doesn't even matter what it is that you buy into and sell, taxation applies whether you like it or not.

People quite often assume that just because crypto isn't legal or mentioned by name that they don't have to pay tax. That's false. It's dangerous as well, because when your government starts to ask your exchange for user information and the exchange hands it over to them, you'll be busted and forced to pay the tax you 'owe' them plus a hefty fine.

Governments haven't been very active on that front in the past, but that will change in the forthcoming years.

It's definitely interesting to know, but the comparison is a bit unfair when it comes to long term value preservation. Fiat units of weak countries go down much harder against the US dollar than any other fiat currency, and when you put something that goes down a lot against something (satoshi units in this case) that goes up a lot, then you'll realize how different the economical models are.

What I do consider interesting is putting Bitcoin in 2018 during its bear market against Venezuela's fiat currency. Both tanked hard, which makes the comparison a bit more fair; what stands out is that even if you bought Bitcoin around the peak levels of $20,000 and held it all the way down to the $3000 level, you still did better than holding Bolivars during the exact same period.

Bitcoin's 85% correction from top to bottom made you lose less purchasing power than the Bolivar. Let that sink in for a moment.

The trick is to not attempt to time the market.

When I consider the price to be low enough I start dollar cost averaging on the way down after every 10-20% decrease. If you keep buying you'll eventually buy the bottom or very close to it. My lowest entry point so far is $3300 which is pretty damn close to what right now looks like the bottom. If the price would have fallen below $3000 I would just continue buying, no difference there.

Last year I started a bit too early dollar cost averaging between $6000-$7000 but this year even these relatively higher entry points have turned into paper gains.

The few compliant exchanges within the US aren't enough to satisfy the SEC. Asia is what the SEC is concerned about, because that's where most of the unregulated exchanges come from, and they are a significant contributing factor to the demand that steers Bitcoin.

I would say that when US based legacy institutions start offering Bitcoin trading, that the odds of an approval will actually increase significantly. Now the odds are either stagnant or falling back down due to volume manipulation and all the drama that's happening over at Tether and Bitfinex. We're not booking any progress yet, and that has to change.

India has the odds stacked against it when it comes to crypto, but that only makes it more likely for fud spreaders to exploit India's anti crypto attitude in order to have the price move down, which it didn't in this case. I want to see them either accept or reject it, and as long as that isn't the case I don't add much value to rumors.

I am not aware of Money Control's integrity when it comes to their publications, but Bloomberg has proven to not be a reliable news outlet at all. They have released negative news articles about Bitcoin in the past that turned out to be fake. They also seem to be anti Bitcoin, so it doesn't surprise me at all that they spread fake news.

Risk tolerance is different from person to person, which also depends on age. I however wouldn't ever consider an investment (doesn't matter what it is) risk free. I am a Bitcoin maximalist myself, but we have to take into consideration that our risk tolerance is completely different from those who aren't as maximalist.

Fundamentals are a bitch in terms of crypto pricing. It only required one or two frustrated large holders on an exchange as Bitstamp or Coinbase to dump it below $3000 and the market might have looked completely different right now. Only in hindsight we can confirm bottoms and thus what the best entry point was. Don't ever assume the bottom is in because the price looks very low fundamentally.

There is a saying that markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent, and it's true.

There definitely is a noticeable difference between adoption before and after the 2017 bull run. I have so many more people around me that are willing to accept Bitcoin as payment form for goods and services that I haven't used my throwaway PayPal accounts much in the last 1-1.5 years.

When the price dipped below $6000 last year people were literally begging me to pay in Bitcoin. For me that's not an issue at all because I replace every satoshi that I spend, so I'm happy to distribute coins amongst more normal folks here.

I must however say that I don't yet feel comfortable saying that I am in Bitcoin since 2013. I either say that I have a few $k worth of it or that I panic sold during the 2018 bear market. Better safe than sorry. This is something I'm sure a lot more people deal with in their personal environment.

I have seen various Indian people on social media say that they aren't aware of this news at all. They're either not following the right local news sources, or this whole story is bogus meant to drag the price down. We have seen various fake news attempts already to manipulate the price and it wouldn't suprise me if this fits in that category too.

Considering that the smart money isn't reacting to this I would say this story is bogus, or the market doesn't care about India, which would be a good outcome in case it turns out to be true. Time will tell.