In an ideal world people would ignore these exchanges, but in the crypto world people don't seem to give a shizzle and continue using the exchanges they know are participating in very shady market activity.

Most of these exchanges are very soft with their AML/KYC procedures, and that's what people like about them because they can continue trading trash coins over there. It's all about greed in crypto, not about what makes sense to do.

An easy way to figure out if these exchanges are really that popular, is to check out their website ranking stats. In most cases these exchanges have a poor ranking. Poor ranking with top 10 exchange volume is a red flag.

I hope this will help them boost their operation to generate more volume, and it probably will with how eager Bitcoiners are to try out anything related LN. Accepting LN payments is a great way to generate free media attention.

Malta seems to be trending towards a crypto safe haven with more and more services settling themselves there. Malta's freedom is what attracts economical activity, which is something close minded governments miss out on.

I see some utility in Bitcoin based debit cards, but the main point here is that you aren't spending Bitcoin, but still fiat with high fees. If you already own a non Bitcoin debit card and it works just fine, then use that one instead.

In this case you're using an intermediary service on top of another intermediary service. You ask permission from BitPay to execute payments, and BitPay asks permission from Visa or whatever other base financial institution.

African countries have a history of having very poor and selfish governments, so no, it doesn't seem to be possible. It's time for people to stand up and distance themselves from a system that keeps them poor and uneducated.

Bitcoin is the right tool to help people accomplish this goal, the only thing from here is that people need to realize what Bitcoin brings to the table. The first thing most people see is a speculative asset, and that needs to change.

That being said, people not fully understanding Bitcoin is a good thing for now, because let's be honest here, Bitcoin isn't ready to onboard them on a serious scale. LN will eventually, but eventually isn't right now....

Contrarians as minority have done way better going against the majority so far, and there is no reason to believe this time will be different with how the mass has been an amazing counter indicator.

I still see people be somewhat bearish when it comes to Bitcoin, especially with how altcoins have been gaining more momentum, and this is exactly what gives me the confidence to accumulate more Bitcoin and firmly hold it.

Altcoin euphoria always ends with a lot of blood and the money that will flow in Bitcoin will cause a sweet leg up, especially with the block halving being an important event to focus on.

I honestly find the market rather predictable in the short term with how most retailers with unstable moods are not participating in the market. Most short and long opportunities were quite easy to settle profitably.

I usually am quite conservative when it comes to trading, but I have taken an opportunity or two in the recent weeks to do some trading after a long period of paper trading, and it worked out well so far.

I'm currently long around $3950 and it seems to be a good move so far. My intention is to lock in profits the moment we hit $4200 because I believe that the strong resistance around that level will initiate large dumps tanking the price.

They will realize that they paid the wrong group and try out another one, and this continues till they find one that does end up bringing in some profits. People are paying for signals because they suck hard.

If you spend a week or so trying to understand the basics of how markets work and how to read charts, you very likely will do just as well in terms of having profitable positions as when you would when paying for signals.

Most of these people are wasting their time waiting for the price to do something. If they spent even 10% of that time educating themselves, they would be a whole lot further in life now. It's pathetic.

It's one shady happening with how Binance has worked out this scheme structure. It prioritizes a small number of individuals and makes the majority of the people who are super desperate wait till the sale is over.

It means that whenever the coin becomes tradable, there are tens of thousands of people waiting to get in, and these are the people the privileged early birds will end up dumping on. It's a low life way of creating liquidity.

I had a lot of respect for Binance in the past, and still do to a certain degree, but it's fading quickly with how they are not only acting very shady, but this takes demand away from platforms such as Ethereum.

I think you're taking the sending to space part a bit too serious. All that's happening is you broadcasting your transaction to a satellite and from there it bounces back to whoever you sent your transaction to.

It allows you to use Bitcoin without needing an internet connection, and that's the main advantage here. It does require you to have a hardware setup, but with time these setups will become more user friendly and cheaper.

I haven't tried it yet, and I probably won't ever have to with how solid the infrastructure is in Europe, but in certain countries this is definitely a useful feature, especially with oppressive regimes censoring everything.

Bitcoin's history not useful? I think it's people like you who aren't useful to this space. I'm glad that the bear market knocked some sense into people's heads, because they were clearly in need of it after 2017s mania.

If you weren't so obsessed with gains, you would have noticed how similar the cycles are this market is going through. Paying attention to this would have prevented you from burning yourself holding expensive bags.

EOS liquidated over a billion dollars worth of ETH that they raised with their ICO. In other words, they have quite some money to blow on whoever wants to accept it in return for kind reviews and rankings.

I don't mind people trying to make money speculating with EOS, because it's a pump happy coin, but what I can't stand is how people praise its governance model and consider it to be better than Ethereum.

Ethereum stimulates decentralized internet, EOS gives us the exact same rubbish banks and whatnot have given us in the last couple of decades. It's not an improvement but a straight cash grab.

Well said. If you think logically, exchanges right now are as stacked with coins as they were during the peak of 2017s bull run. Hackers start with $0 and end up with whatever amount they end up with. Everything above $0 is a gain for them.

Another thing is that everything related to Russia and North Korea allows news outlets to generate cheap clicks, especially with these headlines, so take it with a grain of salt.

State hackers are good in making it look like it was x country that initiated a cyber attack, while in reality it's not like that at all. It's too easy to put all the blame on North Korea, regardless of how much we dislike them.

That's definitely true, but the difference that favors the bulls in this case is that we're re-testing the 200WMA that keeps moving up as time goes by, while last year we kept testing the same flat support level.

I don't agree on the resistance levels being difficult to find. If we break below the 200WMA that functions as major support average right now, it will turn into a major resistance average. Support becomes resistance once broken.

Not sure what you exactly mean by that, but if it's something like being a bear right now is more risky than a bull that buys right now, it could be, but only time will tell. In hindsight we're always either right or wrong

That's a very weak point and doesn't only apply to Bitcoin. My 100 gram gold bar is still a 100 gram gold bar, even if in the worst case scenario every economy and fiat currency in the world implodes.

I would even say that my gold bar will hold more real world value than Bitcoin where we are right now. Gold has nothing to prove, while Bitcoin on the other hand has everything to prove in terms of being a developed asset.

What you can do is follow the trend, and as long as it is down, which has been the case for over a year now, people expect it to go down further and either short or have fiat ready to buy up spot in case the price does tank.

The thing however is that following the trend hasn't really offered that much of an advantage in the last months. People were better off longing the 200WMA touches and take profits on the upper side of the channel we're in.

It's quite similar to how the $5800 mark offered massive support last year. You long the $5800 touch and short where you believe the next lower high would be. It worked for most of 2018 till there was no support left and we tanked hard.

People didn't pay attention to CBOE halting their Bitcoin futures due to their poor volumes. Doing $4-$5 million a day in volume is well below what a trashy exchange such as Yobit generates.

I strongly believe that right now most of the weak hands are out already. What we are left with are those who are still in doubt but firmly hold just because they think that's the right thing to do because people say so.

It may require one more flash dump to make even these people unload their coins to get rid of what is left in latent selling pressure. The price re-testing its December low will very likely do it.

Same here, but the fomo and hype cycles are what make people actually pay attention to crypto. If it wasn't the mad gains making people enter this market, what else would? I entered because of a bull run too.

Only a very people buy into Bitcoin because they like the underlying tech, while over 90% of the people solely buy Bitcoin for speculative purposes. This is the reality of today where gains is almost all that matters.

At the end of the day, if Bitcoin keeps growing, and I definitely think it will, the increasing liquidity within this market will make it more difficult for fomo and hype to affect its value unless the market as a whole goes nuts.

Bakkt (if they manage to get an approval, which I don't believe they will in their current coin backed form) will generate some attention and volume when they launch, but that's purely market makers doing their thing.

I seriously doubt Bakkt will be an important price booster with how high people's expectations are. Building up a clientele and generating actual (non market maker) volume will take years, and who knows where we are by that time.

Nasdaq is planning to do the same, but they haven't been as loud in the media. Competition will be fierce because it's only a matter of time before we see more players offer the same financial instruments.

Being first mover will hold some weight, but who is going to be that first mover?

It could very well be yeah. Most of the exchanges in crypto are unregulated, and plan to stay unregulated. If your goal was to gain ground as legitimate and compliant exchange, which Coinbase is, you are completely open and willing to go for it.

Some exchanges do ask for KYC verification, but that's just an attempt to shake off unwanted attention from authorities. We don't know what's going on behind the scenes and they still are an unregulated entity.

Binance mildly started to ask for more personal information, but there is a reason they don't want to become regulated, and money laundering might be part of that, or maybe they just want to continue making insane amounts of money as they are doing now.

I might be totally wrong on the money laundering aspect, but I somehow feel there is something shady going on with Binance.

I'm from Europe myself and can tell you that WA is super popular over here. I honestly don't know anyone aside from elderly people who aren't using it, but they don't even use email and other applications we can't live without today.

I don't know how popular Bitcoin payments will be when implemented, but this is quite a positive development considering the billions of people who are using WA almost on a daily basis.

Back when I started here I could only dream of this, and Bitcoin was still more or less that speculative investment people thought could go to zero overnight. Barely anyone aside from skeptics think Bitcoin will go to zero anymore.