This year is crucial for bitcoin.

We've seen lots of merchants abandon bitcoin because of the transaction fee problem. We've also seen merchants enable other coins. Bitpay is bus working on enabling BCH, Litecoin and ETH. Stripe, which dumped bitcoin, has said it will enable LTC, ETH and others.

The more that merchants enable alts, the more the network effect will belong to alts and not bitcoin.

The founder doesn't matter. Satoshi for example has been missing in action since 2011...

Litecoin is getting a lot of merchant adoption as a result of the bitcoin fee problem in 2017. (Bitcoin's mempool has cleared but merchants are making contingency plans in case it happens again - this is great for the coins that are added, the more adoption, the more likely it is they will take bitcoin's place).

Facebook's reaction to ICO advertising is because the US regulators mentioned they were looking into ICO's and Facebook wants to stay ahead of the game. (After they got caught allowing illegal Russian adverts in the US election, Facebook doesn't want to be associated with other potentially illegal activity). It has nothing to do with Litecoin.

Ethereum. It's managing to handle more than a million transactions a day - four times the amount bitcoin is coping with.

Most of the really innovative projects are built on top of the ethereum network.

There is a Bitstamp employee on reddit called Bitstamp-Lucas:

https://www.reddit.com/user/Bitstamp-Lucas

Make an account on reddit and then send him a private message, detailing your problem and listing your ticket number. (see the link on the right hand side of his profile which says "send a private message")

https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoin-mining-comes-to-new-york-as-lawmakers-approve-power-allocation


This is a really positive development. We need bitcoin mining to become decentralised around the world. And once lawmakers start associating bitcoin with jobs, they will be really reluctant to ban it.

There is no manipulator (though there was back in 2013, with the willy-bot).

The market cap of bitcoin is now just too large, which means there are too many actors and the money you need to crush all those actors would run to the billions.

I think people need to take a deep breath. The price this time last year was about $1000. Bitcoin is still above the support line from 2017 (draw a line through all the lows and you see a rising slope), and it's at teh price it was last November. The December price was not real, it was caused by a bunch of noobs fomo buying and the line went up vertically. When that happens, it always corrects to where it should have been - which is around the $7,500 to $9000 level.

Nah. Bitcoin went up too fast. Most long time holders had never seen a vertical rise like the one that happened last December. Mst people would have had a $10,000 target to sell (they would have bought in the $500 to $1000 range).

When it went over that, they cashed out, knowing it was too good to be true. As the mempool cleared and people finally got their coins to the exchanges, people sold.

It has nothing to do with Wall Street and everything to do with the fact that bitcoin went from $10,000 to $19,400 in a single month. and people exited

This time last year bitcoin was in the $1500 to $1800 range and we were all breaking out the champagne!

It won't fall that far back - but even if it does, it will be higher than the last peak which means the overall upward trend is intact. (To break the overall trend, BTC needs to fall below $1100)

Greed is the biggest factor in crypto.

So many people go All-In, thinking, that is the only way to make a huge amount of money.

Of course it's a way to lose all your money too.

If you want to survive as a trader you need to practice risk managemrnt. Only stake 1/10th of your stash on any given trade. If you win, you will be up a little. If you lose, you will be down 1/10th, but you are still in the game.

As your stash gets slowly bigger, your one-tenth trade gets bigger too - but it is controlled risk because you arn't risking everything.

Warren Buffet is an old man who is honest about admitting that he knows nothing about tech.

In the 1990's he avoided all tech stocks: he said he didn't understand them and that made him vulnerable to mistakes. So he didn't invest in any of them. He missed the duds like pets.com, but also the winners like Google.

He is just being consistent here. He doesn't understand cryptocurrency. He feels he doesn't know which one will be the winner. It seems to him that it might be a repeat of the 1990s when loads of people poured loads of money in the dud stocks just because they had dot.com next to their name.

Why are people getting so upset about his opinion. He is right that if you don't understand something, you should stay away. And that no-one knows who the winner will be from this revolution. (In 1999 it didn't look like google - that only became apparent a decade later).

Wells Fargo stopped dealing with Bitfinex, and I guess they are wary of all crypto because the US regulators are investigating Bitfinex for operating without a money processing licence.

I think you are just collateral damage, as a result of Fargo being burnt by Bitfinex, and they're now just sour on all crypto.

This is the reason why people should have more than one bank account. There is always someone who spoils things for others and you never know when banks will say, "I've had enough" and pull the plug. 

Satoshi thought and planned for it.

If the bitcoin price falls below the cost of mining, some miners will exit. It will temporarily cause block discovery to lengthen as the existing miners striuggle - but after 2400 blocks, the difficulty will adjust down. That means it's easier to mine. (The difficulty is directly linked to the cost of mining as you need many more miners to win a block when the difficulty is high).

Basically you'll get iterations of this till the cost of mining falls below the bitcoin price. If the bitcoin price fell to $1 I expect you'll be able to mine them with your laptop as the professional mining farms will have long given up.

It isn't "organised movement". It's simply profit taking. Remember that 1800 new coins are minted every day, and at $8000 each, the market needs at least $14.4 million in new money coming in every day to absorb them. If existing money is exiting, then the price falls back.

That's why the best guide to the bitcoin price is the Google Trends chart for the keyword "bitcoin". When it rises, there is enough new money coming in to absorb the new coins and those existing coins that are being sold. If the interest falls, then the prices drop.

Some coins hardly budged when Bitcoin dropped - Monero for example. Presumably because the people who were buying it were buying to spend in the dark markets.

Nobody knows - it's impossible to time these things.

If you are buying, it's best to dollar cost average. Instead of buying in one lump sum hoping to time the bottom, buy a little every week. Even if the price goes down from where it, you won't be locked into the current price, you'll be averaging your buys downwards.

People shouldn't be using credit cards to purchase bitcoins - it's more expensive that way. Wire money to the exchange, yes, you will have to wait a few days for the money to arrive, but you then buy with lower fees.

Bitcoin is still in the rising channel that started in 2017 (draw a line through all the lows since the start of 2017, and you see we're still above a rising channel.

It will test $7,500 again, but what happens next depends on whether there is hedge fund money patiently waiting to buy in at that level.

They may never re-open. Both exchanges are in trouble - they both hold a lot of tether and are getting scrutiny from the US regulators.

My advice is to find some other exchange to trade on.

The Nov 2013 - Jan 2015 crash was the most brutal because it went on so long - 14 months in all. Towards the end I started to think it would range trade between $150 to $250 forever.

The short sharp crashes are easier to deal with because the psychological pain only lasts a few months. Lets hope the current crash is one of the short sharp ones.