Surprising, given the fact that some people seem to hold the view that ERC20 is outdated and is going to be replaced by platforms such as TRX or whatnot that are relatively new and also host utility tokens like BTT.

It just goes to show that ETH is still going strong and isn't likely to change in the near future.

Again, I think that ETH could be a good long term hold because of this. ETH2.0 will be exciting developments for sure and current prices for ETH aren't that high anyhow.

What you're saying is undoubtly true. However, how are you going to convince people to do this?

It's easy enough to say it, but it's another thing completely for actual, practical use of BTC to be fostered.

I think that one of the most important things right now is the fact that people are only accepting BTCs through merchants - as opposed to accepting it directly through an integrated BTC accepting protocol. These merchants are essentially middlemen that we were supposed to eliminate in the first place, like Bitpay or whatever. That introduces the fiat part of the equation back into BTC, and makes no sense.

I don't really get why people don't bother to simply download electrum - the processes involved are just as easy as a web wallet, sometimes even easier given the fact that a lot of web wallets hide certain functionalities in obscure places (cough cough, blockchain.com).

Even worse are hosted wallets, where you don't have custody over your own private keys.

It essentially defies the entire point of cryptos to begin with. Absurd.

Recognition doesn't mean acceptance, in my opinion.

They are likely trying to educate the public in terms of cryptocurrencies in general and not just specifically decentralised cryptocurrencies, in order to push their own potential future cryptocoin that is imminent to launch.

This is positive news, but not really anything other than that. It's likely to not have significant repercussions in the future.

I think that is purely a myth.

Stablecoins aren't allowing institutions to adopt more. What they are allowing is people to access and trade cryptos more easily, circumventing fiat related regulations when it comes to trading because of the fact that it is a blockchain based token, retaining fungibility and anonymity to a degree of traditional cryptos.

In terms of institutions, I find it highly unlikely they'll favour stablecoins for their day to day operations as opposed to simply using existing banking services.

Thanks for the heads up.

This is actually one of the less subtle scams out there at the moment. More subtle ones take advantage of unicode to present a URL that is completely identical to the actual Binance.com domain as it fools your browser, essentially.

There's a reason why it is recommended to save exchange URLs to your browser bookmarks and NEVER click on any google ad results when searching for exchanges. Also, beware of giveaway scams where scammers may directly target your email inbox.

That's ridiculous, you should email their support about it.

This is unacceptable given the fact that you hold a balance with them that you're supposed to be able to access at any given time, on demand. This essentially takes away from that. They could cite technical difficulties all they want, but the onus is on them to provide users with on demand access to their funds.

Let us know what they respond with, please.

Unlikely.

Coins like these happen once in a blue moon, and there are many more examples of coins that went to absolute zero and have a dead chain essentially and never have recovered in 2-3 years time.

Don't blindly hold. I think that's the most rational thing to do. Only hold if you have reason to. If there are no long term fundamentals to back up your decision to hold then it's really a dumb thing to do .

I'd be more long on IOTA to be honest, and get rid of some of the coins that have only recently popped up and have relatively small market caps.

IOTA is one of the coins that I think has a ton of potential, but is liquid enough and well established enough that there is not a lot of downside risk to go with it either. So it's certainly worth going long especially in bearish conditions like right now.

The upcoming bull market will likely not drag along small caps, because institutional money simply do not flow there.

Do they have any idea what actual liquidity means?

Simply put, not all liquidity is put on orderbooks, as you say. What is a much better measurement is how much demand there is at a particular point, regardless of whether or not that demand is reflected on orderbooks of exchanges.

A simple example would be OTC trades, or P2P traders. Both of them are prominent components that contribute to BTC's liquidity, yet they don't show up on any exchange's orderbooks by nature.

Will they boost demand? Absolutely. Any time there is more usage cases for BTC there will be increased demand.

But will it actually result in a big price hike like some expect? I highly doubt it, especially when you take into account how little buying power individuals have (especially in struggling economies) compared to speculators who are able to influence the market much more by simply trading on leveraged derivative products.

I remember a similar thing being raised for Venezuela, with stats on LBC showing that trading volume increased significantly - even though it was still minuscule compared to the grand scheme of the market, within a few hundred BTC a day.

The stablecoin issuers have obvious incentives.

Essentially, they are getting absolutely free credit. Better yet, they may even charge conversion fees in terms of deposit or withdrawal fees to convert fiat in and out of their coins. Usually, when a bank takes your funds, they have to reward you with interest. With stablecoin, it's essentially an interest free debt instrument for the issuer.

They can take your money and invest it in growth assets or even speculate on bitcoin price itself, even though it is a stablecoin and is supposed to be backed by USD fully. That's why I don't necessarily trust them, you don't know whether they're running a fractional reserve.

Highly unlikely, unless BTC itself has a significant bull run that drags up all alts.

LTC's heydays are over, and even though it still provides significant utility in facilitating cheap transactions and segwit integration, it no longer has the demand from the market like it used to - especially without smart contracts.

It seems very unlikely that it'll be able to climb in value so drastically, unless the entire crypto market sees a pump like 2017.

ICObench has been proven as an unreliable means of obtaining info about the project you're about to invest in.

There have been plenty of instances where ICOBench has wrongfully accredited certain projects with verification statuses when in fact later it was found they are running a fake team and project altogether.

So definitely avoid blindly trusting in their analysis. Do your own diligence, because these people are biased decision makers who accept funding from the ICOs that they rate (sort of like what happened in the GFC with ratings agencies like Moodys).

No, they will not. And especially not when they aren't regulated by any industry regulators in the first place.

The fact is that bounties are a very grey area, and there are unlicensed STOs, ICOs, and whatnot that are running these campaigns that cite KYC as a requirement to get paid - even though there is no clear legislation that requires them to do so.

It's quite clear that it's just an excuse for them to not pay participants out, and it's definitely infuriating.

I think what they were focusing on what the fact that Doge held its value while BTC slid from $9k to $8.7k within the same timeframe.

I still don't think that there is any reason to make a big fuss out of just this, though. DOGE has been historically volatile and this kind of movement is really just normal market fluctuation for DOGE. It's really no signal for a bull market.

Over the long run, Doge doesn't have much potential I don't think. At least not anymore - with the inflood of alts that have much better technology than it.

I don't think that it's necessarily a trend.

Steemit has been around for a long time now and we don't really see it blooming into anything major any time soon. It is way past its previous identity as one of the top altcoins, and the hype has died down very much.

I think that the reason why people used to hype up this kind of project so much is due to the fact that it generated profit for those who used it. But right now, there is no more free money to be had in crypto winter.

I do think that they will be hyped up more than the rest of the market, given the fact that people are looking for alternatives to using centrailsed exchanges which have proven to be quite unreliable over the past few years with all the regulatory tightenings and stuff like that.

However, it still depends on what project it is and the team behind it. Something like BTS isn't likely to produce any extraordinary results in the long run due to the fact that it has been around for a long while now and simply hasn't made any significant moves.

I'd say that BNB still has the edge in this one, since they essentially operate on both sides of the same coin (both centralised and decentralised exchanges).

Why? From a functionality standpoint doge is inferior to almost all altcoins out there, given that it hasn't had any development since probably a few years back now.

There is no smart contract, no lightning network, no nothing. But yet, it still survives.

Why? Because there is a community behind it, and that people are used to trading small value items against DOGE including on exchanges, where it is a major trading pair. Community sentiment is sometimes more important than even the fundamentals.

I would highly suggest that you don't look into investing in any small caps right now at all.

BTC seems to be posed for another breakout, and that usually means that alts will significantly underperform BTC. Especially the illiquid ones, once the bull run in BTC starts, you are going to likely see no returns or even negative returns as investor liquidity flows into BTC.

This coin in particular is only traded on 3 small exchanges, which is a warning sign in and of itself.