Apart from what above posters said, noobies "running" an exchange are going to face times where they need to cover expenses but don't have the funds to do so. What's the easiest way to cover expenses then? Right, take a cut out of people's funds they trusted you with. Or what if you need money in your personal life?

People who haven't dealt with large sums of money shouldn't event attempt to do so. It creates problems.

How is it false? The price outperformed every bit of scaling progress, which isn't the fault of Segwit.

Segwit is the only way to actually get us to somewhat scale. Never say never of course, but with how distributed the nodes are, and the lacking will to even tempt a large enough percentage of the node operators to upgrade to the latest versions, how do you expect the 'legacy block space' to reach that 4MB mark? We're stuk at 1MB and we might stay stuck at 1MB for much longer.

It's very subjective and time-frame specific. If we're talking about 2018 then sure, you're way better off hedging into the US dollar, but 2019 is completely different and we can't just discard that, else you're just cherry picking time-frames to fuel your own narrative.

The positive sentiment around Bitcoin this year is a big motivating factor to why people should buy into Bitcoin rather than the US dollar, and I'm certain that there is a lot of peer-to-peer trading going on in the background.

Look at Venezuela's volume boom this year, the growth in volume is insane this year; https://coin.dance/volume/localbitcoins/VES

Insider sources? You've got to be kidding me. His only INSIDER source is his gut feeling.

One doesn't need to have an "insider source" to figure out that the Vaneck proposal is the most solid one out there, but the ecosystem itself is so messed up that the SEC just doesn't care what they do or say. Give the market a few years to improve and shake off toxic exchanges/entities and we'll be a major step closer.

Bitcoin hasn't given a shit about an ETF. If it pumps, it will pump beyond the moon without anything fundamental justifying it.

I would have preferred to see more Segwit adoption, which to this day still hovers around 45%. Good news is that Binance is looking to make the switch hopefully this year, which means that they'll easily push it over 50%. More good news is that Binance is a trendsetter, so this will definitely motivate other exchanges to follow.

I'm quite happy with the rest. Stable hashrate. Upwards momentum in the price. Block halving coming up. Lightning growing. Etc.

I guess I'll be eating pizza again today, and that while I already had a pizza this Monday (there goes my diet lol).

I'll hype up some people around me to eat pizza too, and I'll pay for them in Bitcoin. It's a good way to utilize the higher price on a very important day in Bitcoin's history.

1 regular pizza is ~0.002BTC (€14) and one day I'll be reminded that I paid 0.0018BTC too much. 

Is the manipulation you're referring to their in-house trading/market making? It's pretty odd for sure, but I honestly believe that most exchanges trade against their users. It's unethical in my opinion because of the advantage they enjoy over the rest, and that in every possible way, but since there isn't much oversight from regulators, exchanges have all the freedom they need to continue doing this.

As for Bitmex having to deal with slippage, that applies to every single exchange in crypto. Bitmex's books tied to the main trading pairs enjoy the highest level of liquidity in the space.

We all hope for the best, but the governments in these countries don't ever undergo a drastic change in their fundamentals. Bad dictators get replaced by one of their buddies pretending to do things differently, then later on (when it's too late) people figure out that nothing has changed at all.

I would love to see them use Bitcoin as currency, but it's not even remotely capable of serving millions of people at the same time. The only option for now is to have a Bitcoin backed fiat currency, where there can't be more fiat units in circulations than satoshis in their reserves. The volatility shouldn't be that much of an issue with how their native fiat currency has gone through more of it than Bitcoin itself.

No ETF will be approved by the SEC in 2019 and very likely not even in 2020. We aren't even sure if Bakkt will manage to pull off a launch with how hesitant the CFTC is, and that with how the CFTC has been pretty loose with its approvals in the past, so don't hope for things that you can't exercise control over.

If anything, the odds of an ETF have turned against us more than ever before with plenty of volume manipulation, Bitfinex & Tether, etc.

Unless the proposal gets withdrawn and refilled.

The worst ever shitcoin can't even go to zero, so how will Bitcoin ever go to zero?

I think these critics are hoping to be right at one point, because hey, if you guess long enough, eventually you'll be right. They just don't get that even if Bitcoin fails and it sinks back to $100 or whatever, it will still serve a purpose. This virus can only temporarily be put to a stop if you cut off the world power supply, which isn't possible with how distributed the power sources are. Suck on that. 

It doesn't matter who we are talking about, everythinig that cuts in the rate of inflation by 50% is a big deal. Bitcoin was already hard obtain in large quantities (especially during bull cycles where people don't let go of their coins), but now less of it is flowing into the market, which means that more people have to compete for an even smaller pool of freshly minted coins.

The block halving will be calculated in before it actually takes place because of how smart money is front running the event. Whatever happens after the block halving is largely the result of more demand due to the hype because of how the price has gone up prior to the block halving. Retail money ignores what's going down or remains stagnant, but loves to jump in when the price has shown green for a longer period of time.

Same here. I still run Bitcoin Core 0.16.3 (latest version is 0.18.0) which contains the most important fixes dealing with the bugs in the previous versions, which means that I'm good for now. I'll upgrade to the latest version when there is a worthy enough difference to upgrade for, which isn't the case yet.

Best thing is to run clients through https://www.virustotal.com/ to see how other antivirus software solutions react to it. In most cases you'll only see one or two positives, which are mostly false anyway.

In other words, other institutions pumped the price of Bitcoin to levels JPMorgan doesn't feel comfortable averaging in. I like that.

Intrinsic value is in the mind of the beholder, and can be subject to change depending on the condition of the market. An overbought market today is tomorrow's missed opportunity. Get on board or cry yourself to sleep. With how there are plenty of platforms to short Bitcoin, you can actually put your money where your mouth is and short it, or else, gtfo.

Why do people even use this crappy exchange? It has been acting very shady for years now and people still subject themselves to these assholes?  

The main purpose behind all these silly questions and requests for more information is that they hope you get sick and tired of this nonsense and drop your account with all the coins in it. I'm certain there have been thousands of people already who just left because the little funds they had in their account wasn't worth the hassle of potentially getting them back.

They are also faking trading volume. Their reported volume in the last 24H is $1 billion. Yeah right.  

Can't tell beforehand.

I see a lot of selling going on as we speak (open up your exchange tab and see it happen live for yourself), and so far the sales are absorbed with little to no effort and we keep going back to that $8000 level, which is a positive sign in my opinion. The more people we see take profits right now, the easier the ride up will be when the rush continues.

I would love a revisit of $6000 (or even lower) so I can buy back lower, but the bulls have shown more strength than I initially gave them credit for.

Bitstamp's orderbook currently has a depth of +$80 million in visible buy orders, which is more than double of what it was before we started pumping, which shows that this increase isn't based on hot air, and this after the 5000BTC dump that took like $35 million out. This is very impressive I would say.

Seasoned Bitcoiners are pretty demanding, therefore consider most news coverage and/or documentary fragments to be bland or non information, but for average joes this is completely different. Everything related to Bitcoin is new and exciting, and I'm certain that this documentary or whatever you want to call it will do good and even motivate people.

The first time I heard about Bitcoin was through a documentary and I can remember that I got pretty pumped after watching it. If even a slight percentage of the viewers of CBS's 60 minutes end up digging into Bitcoin, that's a massive plus. It means more adoption than we had before the documentary, which we can't complain about, right? 

Many versions of centralized databases you mean.

Crypto as a whole has deviated from its main purpose, to something that appeals to idiots thinking that the blockchain is a wonder pill that will transform this world for the better. I knew the blockchain ecosystem sucked hard, but it has gotten so much worse with how investors throw money left and right just to have their capital sit in something with blockchain in its name.

The internet boom resulted in innovation, practical uses, etc. The blockchain boom is a fools game that will result in a bad ending.

Didn't you notice? It was a big thing in the mainstream media, that's why they spent money on these ads. It's called marketing.

Where else can you reach world wide exposure for an amount that's probably well under a tenth of what they usually would have to pay for the same level of exposure. I'm sure they'll do it again next year and yet again claim that they have no plans to work with crypto in any shape or form.

People want to see the Ebay's and Amazon's of this world dive into crypto, and that's what Ebay used in its advantage.

Just the speculation alone is enough to pump it through the roof. The token comes handy in cases where frustrated leechers are looking for peers to seed their stuck torrents, which is quite a nightmare for older torrents, but with a token as reward it will help stimulating peers to show up.

It can also stimulate content creators, artists, developers etc to list their content on BitTorrent for a fair price which might help decrease the large amount of piracy that's happening. Another thing is that you can rent bandwidth from people looking to earn a some money. The token is just an incentive to unlock new possibilities that wouldn't likely be unlocked without it.

There is more potential in BTT than 99% of all the ICO's and IEO's that we have seen.

Coinbase already holds over 1 million BTC in custody, so with the almost 800,000BTC that Xapo holds in custody it will be a fucking time bomb.

This once again shows that people have lost their mind. For once you are able to actually own the asset and people are still like passing it off to a bank like entity to take care of it. It's so silly that you have to ask them if it's possible to withdraw your funds. Wait for the moment they tell you that you can only withdraw like 1-5% of your stack a day, that's when you'll regret having used them.

From the banking system where your fiat is locked up, now to crypto exchanges where your crypto assets are locked up. Nice.