I'd been aware that Bitcoin hasn't been the worst performer in terms of current placing against ATHs, but hadn't realised that very few alts are better. In fact, Monero and Litecoin are the 2 I have that have fared only slightly better. Further proof to me that Bitcoin is still the safer bet against any if not all pretenders.

I have small bags of incidental alts, and even one that has fell more than 90% from ATH, though that is in Bitcoin value (unsure or fiat value). Tempting to think those at 80% or more decline are oversold. But if they even catch up to previous BTC value, it'd be a killing.

I'm probably one of the older guys in this forum, with more than half of my life spent working in some job or other and a fair share of work environments over the years. Blue collar, white collar, remote freelancing, even non-profit field work.

So here is my opinion into the ring. And this being crypto makes almost absolutely no difference.

1. There will always be lucky people. These are exceptions rather than rules. Some crypto billionaires, some lottery winners, but if they all fail to work hard, they find that wealth not earned is wealth not kept.

2. Hard work is the pre requisite. Talent and smarts give you the edge but hard work translates the edge to results. No exceptions. The best athletes will say they are lucky, but the more they work/practise, the luckier they get. Probably holds true to the bitcoin trader!

3. A lot of people I know pursue the "smart" path, thinking iy is the easier and quicker alternative to hard work. These end up working hard to pursue aimless goals, always thinking they just need to find the smart formula. Probably applies to gamblers and a lot of crypto traders and ICO investors.

I'd like to think that Segwit adoption has been the main reason for this, but I think we saw the drop happening round about the time price started slipping away from its massive highs. It's definitely had some effect on overall transansaction fees... exchanges lowering them, and of course, onchain fees are getting more effective. But I tend to think like you... that since 2016, the spikes in transactions were motivated. Spam attacks caused that artificial inflation in tx, and people were forced to pay higher fees just to jump in front of the queue. Now that those motivations aren't relevant (they got their forks and their big blocks), we can see that the network is far from reaching its capacity.

Popularity has increased, but I think the good thing to have come from those periods of high fees and congestion is that people are practising more efficient ways to use Bitcoin. Consolidating inputs, less frequent dust spends... it's all good.

A cynic might ask them why they're dropping a million dollars plus costs of the stunt... And then probably ask for further rounds of investment later on. One might say the funding could have gone towards significant development... Or to accelerate product. But that's probably because these tokens aren't actually valued at anything other than what Mainframe thinks they are...

What's that again about nothing really coming free?

I suppose this really is the era of crypto corporatism. We are well and truly here.

I've got no issues with that. I think there are plenty of alternatives for bounty hunters... Medium is really built to help projects use their blogging platform as an integration into their own websites and a good community to start with. LinkedIn should do the same... It feels really spammy these days looking at my Medium and LinkedIn feeds.

There's a space for everything and those fake ICO review sp don't belong on Medium. It is unfair to those who actually do write about projects objectively... But actually i think those are safe from suspension the way I see it.

All this discussion here leads me to think that there could be some value in opening a thread here to share what we know the law says regarding Bitcoin and tax, in whichever jurisdiction we happen to have found conclusive help for. Someone above mentioned that the best person to consult would be an actual tax person, preferably an employee of the tax/revenue entity in your jurisdiction. People here seem to be curious enough. What do you say, OP? Or are we just opening ourselves up to flaming?

OP, should really know better by now than to make assumptions. Even the most basic Bitcoin knowledge, coupled with some low-level research to look up this over/under 1 million bitcoin addresses would have answered your basic questions. All the coins there were generated just the way all bitcoins have ever been.

If the theory is true (I'm sure it's mostly true anyway) what I've always been curious to know though is why those coins were just left there and not introduced to circulation. I doubt it was an oversight to have almost 5% of max supply languishing there (not to mention all them dust people keep sending to these wallets), but perhaps they/he never found a solution he/they liked. I'd like to think there's some reason behind it, and that we'd find out some day.

You probably already know this, but perhaps to state the obvious... Bitcoin value changes very quickly, even in the space of hours. In the past month alone, we've seen swings of almost 50%, so it's very likely you bought your coins at a price about 10% higher than it is right now. Post your wallet address if you want/can, someone here should be able to pinpoint what happened.


Yup. Am pretty sure the balance would tally, if kept strictly in units of Bitcoin.

The problem with long term charts for me is always that they have extremely limited historical data to feed from. I mean, barely ten years of trading, and a lot less with significant volume and global trading, it's unreliable as a predictive tool as you say, even if you might draw some learning from them (but then, you learn from any form of analysis!).

I look at the longest possible timeframe on a chart and of course, it shows solid growth as you said, but negate any number of the early years and it's missing some of the most explosive early trends, but then again, doesn't take remove what takeaways you can get.

There is comfort to be drawn from bull runs after bearish periods, like you said, but there's no guarantee it'll repeat... something the charts might deceive you to think otherwise.

Hey OP, yeah, I think we knew, even though that's not really how figures of speech work

Months is a short-term view, but sure, I think we could see 12k once or twice this spring season. It's still too recent in my memory to consider it elusive. All it takes right now is a 30% jump in price from today's value, and we've seen that happen easily with Bitcoin in a matter of days... for reasons we'll all scramble to find if/when it does happen.

But yeah, some segments of traders might have entered a siege mentality, and if they believe they have to dig in, they'll maintain sandbags around 10k, not daring to cross over until they're sure they've got enough strength to power another bull run.

If you're willing to pay, or if your business requires it, there are quite a number of blockchain analysis tools out there... think the field of blockchain forensics is quietly being developed for enforcement and regulatory use, actually. Saw a couple of proposals bidding for professional work and it's worth a lot of money. Think the guys at Chainalysis and Cointeliigence have been aggressively promoting their services. Then there are upcoming courses like: http://courses.dfironlinetraining.com/bitcoin-forensics

See BitFury's new tool launched a few weeks ago: https://medium.com/@BitFuryGroup/bitfury-launches-crystal-a-blockchain-investigative-tool-for-law-enforcement-and-financial-3d7712dd5dce

If you'd like to try an open source tool, there's one called BlockSci on github: https://github.com/citp/BlockSci

There are also Blockparser and BTCSpark. Since I'm no techie, I've never been able to try any!

Yeah, these armageddon type scenarios are just as unlikely as the moon scenarios - at least in the sense of the coming years. As much as we'd all like to believe in revolutions and new world orders, even with globalisation, these things take a lot of time to materialise and are subject to so much intrinsics that it really doesn't make sense to prepare for them, at least in our lifetimes.

I don't think price will really affect transaction volume - people still use them regardless of how much they're worth. And trading will always continue as long as Bitcoin is the major pair. Miners won't cut off capacity - they'll want to earn as much as others, unless they gather as a huge cartel and take a group decision (which won't happen for as long as it's profitable!).

The monopoly you talk about is there... but it's not quite the single-minded beast we take them to be.

I'm trying to figure out a way to make it more interesting for players even if they already get knocked out early (as Trofo does have a point about keeping interest for a month-long competition). But the basic survivor knockout tournament does have a nice and simple element of risk and reward which I like.

Basically, you get to pick any team only ONCE... if they win their next match, you get to round 2. If they lose, you're knocked out. And so on until there's one player standing. You're allowed to make the same pick if there isn't any other option left, but will be forced to take the weaker team, based on bookie odds. You can buy more than 1 entry, no re-entries but I'll set a limit maybe.

So there are several strategies. Keep picking the strong ones, and hope you reach the finals on forced picks, or try and pick underdogs or even weaker teams when they might win, reserving strong picks for the end.

As hilarious says, it's too much trouble to manage anything more complicated... and I doubt there's a survivor type game online we could play for World Cup but let me have a look. Still got a few weeks to do this. Think it might be popular? could try the league regulars as you said.

That certainly does sound a little strange, but this is the problem when there is no clarity, or precedent. Here in my jurisdiction it was ruled in a 2014 precedent under civil law as not an asset nor a currency, and this is precisely why it is not taxable for as long as they remain as bitcoin. I quote: "Bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies are nothing but exchange agents, such as shells, marbles and pebbles."

Just as they wouldn't have to declare shells and pebbles, you wouldn't need to bitcoin and crypto. Good luck.

That's strange. Never ever been contacted by LBC for that kind of information, but I suspect the "red flag" they're talking about must have arisen from one of your previous trades. Perhaps you were involved in a dispute that didn't end well. Or completed one or more trades with an ID other than your own?

Shame as I really like LBC, but if you're not comfortable with verification, then you should take your business elsewhere. Warning though, eventually, you're going to have to prove your identity everywhere.


It's going to be a little more complicated than that with the new GDPR directive looming (active 28 May to be exact). Any company, even extra-EU, dealing with EU citizens will have to comply as well or risk legal action from its citizens. In particular, with the "right to be forgotten", companies must now also prove to the client that they will only keep the data for as long as needed, and prove that the data is destroyed when no longer needed.

@OP, would it be too much for you to update your first post if you do manage to find some answers? I think there's quite a bit of feedback already from the users here and I agree the important aspects, if you were to declare the income, would be to 1) quantify the value at each earning 2) provide the transaction trail 3) back invoicing (?).

I'm learning the ropes in my own current jurisdiction as well, but I have some issues:
1. Like you, my crypto earnings qualify as freelance income.
2. I am only taxed when I convert the coins to fiat (I believe this is similar to UK). It makes the most sense as well, so there's no difficulty in adjusting price, etc.
3. Invoicing doesn't work well when selling OTC(!).

Here are three that serve clients in the EU - Estonia should, therefore, come under that:
- Identity Trust Management (identity.tm)
- IDnow (idnow.eu)
- verify-U AG (verify-u.com)

I've personally used one of them and it was pleasant enough, think their video centres are even located in Eastern Europe, but that's just my highly uneducated guess.

By definition, impenetrable means that it is conclusively not possible to breach... Even the biggest bear and disbelievers wouldn't put it beyond Bitcoin to at least make many more runs past 12k before its eventual fate is met.

We're all speculators in the end, regardless of our strongest beliefs in this thing that is Bitcoin. Every step of the way, it's been impossible to predict where the price would be in a week, month, year. I still harbour the highest hopes but I haven't been led away by the fact that Bitcoin can as easily arrive at 1 million as it can to zero.

Even if or when btc makes it past 12 k again, doesn't mean anyone's a genius or a fool, either. Just some of us get luckier.

We've got all these crowd wisdom trading platforms, big data /deep data insight, machine learning, AI, platforms all seemingly happening upon the newfound wisdom of TA... yet not a single one of these can claim to have reliable results with consistent performance. I think even the most astute traders wouldn't dare claim that their charts instil confidence in them.

I'm not saying they're completely useless... but I think they are as useful as the purposes they're built for. As useful as the traders who use them make them out to be. I don't do more than dabble, but it should say something when people start posting charts for as long as they look useful... and then stay remarkably silent when Bitcoin just goes off script.

I still think people get lucky. And they want to see the recipe for luck in charts.

That's right. The numbers don't lie. In fact, the only reason Bitcoin hashrate ever goes down is when miners switch over to more profitable alts - we saw this in the months following the Bitcoin Cash fork. It's still profitable as ever, you can bet even miners are just holding on to what they can for now, they're not worried about long-term prospects... if there's one thing miners aren't, it's short-term speculators.