Uh, technically, nope. Back in 2017 the price broke through all previous resistance levels and created new highs continuously. Right now we have resistance levels to break through from $5800 to $19,500 lol. No way it's going to be the same as what happened in 2017.

But then again, you seem to be more of a price chaser who doesn't care about what's happening under Bitcoin's hood. Perhaps it's time for you to review your technical indicators. 

Tether is by far the most dominant stablecoin in the market. The few other stablecoins don't have the economical mass and adoption needed to support the market.

From the 2.8 billion tokens it has in circulation, more than half of that is being used to rotate through Bitcoin exchanges providing a lot of buy support. It's also money that will not be cashed out because of how distributed it is amongst traders world wide. The only way to cash out is to suck off Bitfinex, and who's going to do that nowadays? They probably don't even have the fiat left to actually allow you to withdraw fiat.

In other words, people just sit on their USDT hoping for a dump to buy Bitcoin, and this is basically a never ending cycle.

The total crypto market cap is fake and extremely leveraged. Fake as in the far majority of the altcoins having huge market caps due to their billions of circulating units, and leveraged because of how a little amount of money can pump this market to the moon, because it's super illiquid.

Bitfinex in the past has shown that a 50-100 million USDT injection is enough to pump the price with 10% and that was when the price hovered above $6000. What it meant for Bitcoin was that 50-100 million USDT was enough to increase its market cap with +$10 billion. And as you know, Bitcoin up = altcoins up, so that inflates the global market cap even further.

That was very supicious for sure.

Also the fact that whoever this entity was, only used the most reputable fiat exchanges (e.g. Bitstamp, Coinbase and Kraken) in the space to utilize their dominance. No Bitfinex and no USDT crap. It was also a Bitcoin only lead pump, which again indicates at institutional activity, because they are building products based on Bitcoin and not whatever random shitcoins.

Also take in mind that before the pump to $5000 the CME futures volumes exploded. This definitely isn't coincidence at all.

It's so funny though, despite the fact that stealing electricity can be detected in an early stage, it always takes months or a year before the electricity company or the local police step in or just have a look at what's going on. The consistency at which the electricity is being used 24/7 in that region is most likely an indication of people growing marijuana, or in the more recent years also mining crypto.

I didn't read anything about how mining Bitcoin helped him launder money.

Right. Instead of looking at Bitcoin being worth $5000 today, one could also say that a dollar is worth $0.0002 now.

I wasn't there myself at that point, but I read some articles where legacy news outlets were wondering how something like Bitcoin could be worth $1, the same amount as the USD. It's not backed by the government, created in a fraudulent manner, and there is no way it can go up even more. Boy, they couldn't be more wrong.  

The "positive" side of the printing presses working like never before is that money is so cheap, that institutions are more likely to buy into risky asset classes such as Bitcoin.

Bitcoin will always be able to recover. If Bitcoin can deal with MtGox, it can also deal with a silly iFinex (the company that owns Bitfinex and Tether).

I rather have iFinex implode right now, then buy up cheap Bitcoin as a Golden opportunity, and see it continue to grow in a healthy manner. Seriously, these events are a blessing; you get to buy cheap Bitcoin and we got rid of a company that has been poisoning this ecosystem for a long time.

Bitfinex's volumes have gone down continuously. The whales usually spoofing its books have left too. It has become a noob exchange. One has to be to still use this shit.

If that happens, Bitcoin is very likely at a stage people no longer care about it, because they consider it useful.

I remember back when multi billion dollar internet companies such as Google weren't as big as they are today; people were worried about how their datacenters would impact the environment, and even referred to them as environmental disasters. Do you see people complain about Google's datacenters nowadays? Nope. People no longer care because they so heavily depend on these companies and everything related to the internet.

People are hypocrites. Everything they don't think they need is either a fraud or useless. Wait for the moment they more than ever need Bitcoin in their life. It's not a matter of if, but a matter of when.

I think the most likely platform to be launched on is Ethereum if it isn't a premissioned ledger. I personally consider Bitcoin one of the worst platforms to launch a token on if it isn't meant to store a massive amount of value like USDT. Tokens like USDT being worth billions need that security, a shit token doesn't.

Ethereum offers the most secure smart contract platform, and has the best developers working on it, plus the network effect plays a role too. Running on Ethereum allows easy integration with most exchanges, services, wallets, etc. I will laugh hard if they go for TRON or EOS instead.  

Agreed. I'm certain that most of these legacy institutions have some sort of an exposure to crypto through proxy firms.

People here blindly assume that they are still going to enter the market at some point in the future, but they are here already. It's not for nothing that we see large players such as Fidelity, TD Ameritrade, Nasdaq, Bakkt, etc try to claim their cut of the pie.

Goldman Sachs has even admitted to buy into Bitcoin on behalf of their clients. Not sure if this concerns futures or spot Bitcoin, but the interest is real.

It depends on what the ban actually is. It won't necessarily harm Bitcoin itself, but will certainly harm the rate of adoption, and the flow of money that exchanges still need bank accounts for. The higher the price is, the more secure the Bitcoin network is. It has never been a major problem, but still something to consider taking serious.

Most regulated exchanges are compliant enough to not trigger any unwanted attention from the governments, so there is no need to worry about that. I would even like to say that governments prefer these exchanges to exist and control a large portion of this space, because that means more tax income, less manipulation, and less people wiring money to a foreign exchange.

Bitcoin's "pollution" is still orders of magnitude lower than the entire world banking system, the datacenters Google, Microsoft and Amazon operate, and I could continue for a while. You get the point (I hope).

The benefit of energy consumption is that it forces every involved party to look for an alternative, because you firstly want your rates to be cheaper (a business is a business at the end of the day), and the alternatives are cleaner as well, which reduces external (political) pressure on your operation, which is another incentive right there.

The worst part is that some people consider it a waste of energy, lol. Securing trillions worth of value every year is a waste, right. 

This can never be a good thing. From what we have seen so far, almost every non crypto related public figure that entered this space promotes blockchain in general, and a shit ton of alts that don't add anything of value to our system. The last thing we need is more of this garbage adoption, because the more of this we have, the less relevance the decentralized nature of this space enjoys.

It's mind boggling how people can be so confident about a specific altcoin, while we know for sure that it will fail eventually. The faith that these people have in altcoins comes from these clown-ish public figures, and they are mostly heavily biased too, either because they have been paid to promote them, or they are balls deep in the coins themselves.

All I hear about nowadays is blockchain this blockchain that. It's rubbish. The blockchain is worthless if it isn't utilized to protect the network in a decentralized way.

I doubt they even consider Bitcoin to be a viable option. Not because of the price and volatility, but more so because of how Russia seems to be in a hurry when it comes to hoarding as much Gold as possible. The same applies to China. I am fairly sure that the publicly known figures about their aggressive Gold buying doesn't reflect the reality, which is much and much higher.

Another thing is that we don't know how much value the Petrocoin has in this specific case, and if Russia is willing to prop it up and cause some sort of a pump and dump effect.

There is no such a thing as the bear market being 'officially' over while we haven't even broken through the $6000 level yet.

That's exactly what I want to see. Dumb money should be wrong more often than they are right, and as long as that happens, smart money has a cash cow to milk till there is no drop of milk left. It may sound harsh, but that's how markets in general work.

People who tried in 2018 have a bad taste in their mouth. 

I don't feel lucky having bought the market down to $3200 because to me that's a practice of common sense. I know that I will very likely NOT be able to buy the perfect bottom, and that's exactly why I am not trying to do so. I always use smaller fractions to buy the market down, where I increase the fractions the lower the price will go. If we hit $2000 I would buy it just like how I bought $3200. Drop it to $1000 and I'll keep buying.

People who bought it by luck just speculated on a bounce and have very likely sold already. Most people were waiting for even lower levels, but they never came.

It happens on both sides of the fence.

Legacy news outlests always hype up the stock market at cost of Bitcoin, and crypto related news outlets always hype up Bitcoin at cost of the stock market or other legacy assets. This is news that average joes love to read, so here they have their daily dose of mud throwing.

Not sure why people here are so upset by reading these articles. Bitcoin has become an asset that institutions have a small position in and becomes more accessible to them as time goes by. Prepare for more of these comparisons instead of less.

I don't consider the Veriblock transactions to be spam at all. Miners seem to confirm their transactions quite rapidly after being published, which makes sense as well if you take into consideration that these transactions have a purpose and the purpose requires some urgency.

BCash's network is experiencing some sort of a spam 'problem' as we speak (more likely an artifical boost to make their chain seem more active than it in reality is). Their transactions have increased significantly, but when you pay attention to what Antpool is doing, they only include the transactions they deem to be non spam, where the other pools just include the rest of the transactions because there is enough space available.

See for yourself; https://blockchair.com/bitcoin-cash/blocks

I'm kinda used to these people. I observe them by throwing a few simple questions in their direction to test them; if they pass the test, I'll do my best to educate them, but if they fail, I will not waste a single second explaining what Bitcoin is. Those who don't care or think it's a scam or fake by default won't listen to anything of what you say. It's ear in ear out.

I have noticed that it's way easier to convince people of Bitcoin being digital Gold rather than money. If you take into consideration that most westerners already have a solid legacy payment infrastructure to use, it's not that much of a surprise that they see Bitcoin as an inferior form of money, but an asset that appeals to them as being digital Gold. The mining aspect of Bitcoin further stimulates that way of thinking.

Aside from the lack of scalability, merchants would be all-over Bitcoin if people actually spent their coins for once, but they don't.

During bull runs people aren't going to get rid of their coins because they strongly believe that they will be worth more next week or month, and during a bear market people are too upset about the loss in value to consider spending them. The current market is not a good environment for Bitcoin or pretty much any other crypto coin to function as proper payment solution for day to day items.

It's so funny. This is a marketing strategy legitimate businesses use. From time to time you have "cash back" discounts, where if you buy x product, they'll send you x amount back to your bank account afterwards. What really happens is that they have all your information and they can sell that to third parties for a decent chunk of money.

Scam sites added their twist to it by going a few steps further. It's so silly how people even take the time to ask people around them if this is a scam or not. How obvious do you want a scam to be in order to realize it is a scam?