That's related to individual entities, not to the government. Nothing prevents merchants anywhere in the world from offering people a 2-3% discount if they use Bitcoin to pay for their goods instead of credit cards, which costs the merchants a bunch of money.

The thing however is that merchants actually like people to pay with Bitcoin without offering any discounts, simply for the fact that with Bitcoin they make more money. I personally would offer the discount to people to attract more business, but not every merchant thinks like that, and most average people within this space paying with Bitcoin aren't familiar with the fee scheme of credit cards.

I'm a big supporter of governments exempting crypto to goods and services payments from taxation, but most will not do that because they don't want to turn crypto into an even bigger threat.

Depending on someone who's been wrong more often than right..... Hmmm. Sounds like a bad idea. Lucky for him, most of what he says about Bitcoin are his opinions and not Fundstrat's. I'm pretty sure that Fundstrat would sack him if he was speaking out on behalf of Fundstrat.

I have been following his non crypto opinions for a while too, and even there he's wrong more often than right. News channels have him on just to make fun of him. In most cases he is asked about why his predictions didn't play out as he expected them to play out. The hosts laugh at him. It's kinda sad to see because he seems like a very decent person.

That's a fair point, but we have had enough examples in the past where certain countries caused the price to increase according to people, but later on the price tanked while the tensions in these countries only kept reaching a boiling point, and that without affecting the price at all.

In markets the charts are the deciding factors. Could geopolitical turmoil affect the price of certain assets? It certainly could, but in most cases the price moves in the direction of the trend it was in, so it's really difficult to attribute price movements to certain events if it doesn't concern something like oil. Gold in the past has turned out to be a very bad hedge multiple times. It is more of a speculative asset than a safe haven asset.

Whenever Bitcoin breaks through some major resistance points, the price will very likely get propelled much higher, which then again will make people scream that it's because of Iran. 

Oil is a sensitive subject in that region, so it's kinda normal to see the price react to such events. Gold however has broken out of a bullish pattern before these attacks happened, so not related to this situation at all. Bitcoin seems to have broken out of a bullish pattern as well, so similarly, not related to this situation at all.

Technicals are the reason prices move up and down in most cases, not some mainstream media average joe type of events such as these attacks.

Yup. Never visit anything other than the actual domain of the service itself.

I did a quick search on youtube for Chipmixer, and on top pops up a scam site using the exact same UI as Chipmixer, but with a different domain extension, namely .se which should raise instant red flags. This is how a lot new people get scammed because youtube is generally the go-to place for tutorials and reviews. Scammers are always a step ahead of the uneducated herd. 

We have to look at how his fund performed based on his 'expertise'. Shit. The dude at the very lows of the market looked at a $100 million paper loss.

The only good thing here is that he has skin in the game, unlike Tom Lee who's constantly talking out of his ass without putting money where his mouth is.

That once again shows that despite your wealth, you can't buy success within this space. Mike is just as much speculating/hoping as much as most people here do. Nothing special about it. Same outcomes too; more often wrong than right.

That's actually a good thing. In case some "tool" really tried to steer the price to a certain direction, which is often referred to as manipulation by the super knowledgeable community here, it shows that "manipulation" doesn't work if the rest of the market doesn't go along with it. 

Price action suggests otherwise. Gold has seen a violent boost in price, so does Bitcoin but it's less violent for us because we're used to these movements.

We had a solid close above the daily 50EMA. It didn't close just slightly above it, but it closed a bit under the 89EMA. I do however find the price to go up too fast and the volumes are somewhat lagging behind. Until we actually see wider time frame change of behavior, there isn't much for me to get really bullish on. We've had plenty of such increases and they all were sold off afterwards.

Just relax and let the price do its thing. Getting bullish every single time the price goes up will only lead to disappointment during a macro down trend.

People cash out to stablecoins when they don't actually want to exit completely. If you hold stablecoins, that can be to sit out a bear market you expect to tank the price, or to exploit arbitrage opportunities between exchanges, hence the reason Tether decided to issue USDT on faster networks like Ethereum, EOS, TRON.

Moving actual fiat between exchanges is very time consuming and burdensome, while moving stablecoins between exchanges takes a few minutes at most through aforementioned networks.

People may not like stablecoins, but they prop up the price of every single crypto. It's capital that doesn't leave the market as quickly and regularly as actual fiat does, especially during bear markets.

The funny part is that fiat isn't going to do anything to increase your purchasing power. Bitcoin even at ~4% inflation blows fiat out of the window in terms of maintaining and increasing your purchasing power, especially over a longer period of time. On top of that, you actually use a new form of money that puts the power into the hands of the people.

In the end, even 0% inflation for Bitcoin can't prevent it from going through a lasting bear market. The speculative nature of this market is a brewing pot for boom and bust cycles. People love to buy what is going up, but dump everything they have when they see the price go down, or ignore the asset in case they don't have any holdings. That's how markets in general are.

Good thing about fiat inflation is that it gives people more incentive to spend it, or buy something like Bitcoin.

https://www.coindesk.com/despite-denials-tron-founder-confirms-investment-in-poloniex-crypto-exchange

Whatever Justin Sun touches, is done to pump his TRON bags. The idea behind these moves is to shove TRON through your throat. So yes, in a sense, it's a cheap BNB "DEX" knockoff.

It's kinda hard to actually benefit from any sort of premium in countries like Iran, Venezuela, etc. The actual liquidity is so thin that you probably will waste more time than actually make money waiting for your orders to get filled. Every 1BTC you add to the ask pool will significantly increase the available supply and tank the premium hard.

Also, what we consider premiums are premiums over our spot price. For people in the aforementioned countries these aren't premiums, but their spot prices. There just isn't a way to acquire Bitcoin any cheaper. Not saying it's totally impossible to arbitrage back and forth, but people's glorified idea of arbitrage trading just doesn't come to fruition here. Can't make it sound any better.

This. It's so funny when people call Bitcoin boring and almost 'threaten' to put their money into a different asset class if Bitcoin doesn't quickly do something.

A lot of people have no prior experience with anything related to investing, which explains why they are so ignorant and reckless. Anyone calling Bitcoin boring just because it hasn't gone up 500% in a matter of months is desperately in need of a reality check. Try put your money into stocks, Gold, etc. You'll be wishing to not have invested in any of these assets with such an attitude.

People who want fast gains don't need Bitcoin. There are a wide variety of options available to make your wildest dreams come true, but the reality is that more people end up broke chasing the quick money.

Too late for that. It has been shared to oblivion on social media.

Real journalism costs a lot of money in terms of research and whatnot. In crypto people are so stupid that they believe anything they read. All you have to do as a news outlet is to browse through reddit, pick a thread, then turn that thread into an article. Endless threads on reddit and thus endless supply of crappy articles.

Click-bait articles really work and for that reason will not stop existing. People have to smarten up first.  

People are entitled to their opinion. From what I can see by browsing through your posts, you just share your opinion, and that's perfectly fine, even if it doesn't align with mine. It's a free discussion place. 

No one said that Bitcoin doesn't work. The majority agrees to the roadmap presented, which is to have less on-chain scalability, but a more lasting form of superior censorship resistant money.

Well, you can give it as much time as you want. It's probably not going to bode well for your portfolio I'm afraid.

Correct observation. In most cases the price is people's only measuring stick when it comes to determining the level of adoption. People couldn't be more further from the truth. Currently the price is lower than its all time high, yet the actual use is much greater, and that also translates into Lightning growing rapidly, which isn't going to be reflected in the price for years.

I was kinda surprised that I found people literally betting satoshis with each other by playing non crypto online games. The losers pay the winner through the Blue Wallet. It's a third party wallet, but one that does provide a decent amount of utility, and as long as the amounts concerned are low, the risk is negligible.

Adoption that can't be measured if the satoshis aren't withdrawn to the main chain but spent directly at Bitrefill for example.

It might have been an attempt to get the price to go up, but it had no ground to do anything with how poor the sentiment is currently. During bear markets good news has no effect on the price at all, the price just follows the trend regardless of how much Bitcoin costs in Iran according to news outlets.

The problem here is partly caused by news outlets just reporting this garbage while they know it's not true, but the main part is how stupid their readers are. If they can pull off such articles without any consequences (consequences being that readers stop visiting their site), their readers must be retarded. On top of that, their readers even spread this fake news with their own social media accounts.

No matter how much of a Bitcoin bull you are, fake news shouldn't be tolerated.

Coinbase's fees have been known to be quite high, but it is the premier exchange to use and people generally have more confidence in Coinbase than any other (cheaper) alternative when it comes to buying Bitcoin.

That being said, according to Wirex's site they do not offer services to US residents. Coinbase is primarily a US exchange, so the comparison in this case doesn't hold too much value.

I was always recommended to stay away from options by traders who are farther in every facet than I am, which I respected but I kept wondering what made options so complicated and risky to trade. This puts things into perspective and I thank you for that. It kinda makes me happy that I didn't proceed to mess with options despite their utility (utility only for those who understand their workings).

I'll just stay within the areas of trading I'm comfortable with. No point in taking on more risk and complicating the whole process of trading. Simplicity is worth a ton.

Bakkt should provide a similar explanation since their aim is to be a retail platform, but I'm pretty sure that they won't go that far because it may scare off a lot of people.

Fake news yes. Plenty of articles have been updated already but their headlines remain because they obviously don't want to lose any clicks.

Including the slight premium, the price of Bitcoin didn't exceed $7700 in Iran, which is much, much different from the +$20,000 figures news outlets are misleading their readers with. I'm really glad that people in Iran stood up and popped the moon boy bubble quickly by stating the truth. It's quite funny how easily people take news for granted in crypto. 

If you think logically, the situation in Iran doesn't even justify any serious premiums. DYOR.