The only super star here is Bitcoin. 

The celebrities people seem to be excited about are nothing more than parasites trying to ride on Bitcoin till they sucked out enough blood and there is nothing more to gain.

The most annoying thing about celebrities is that they don't know what the difference is between Bitcoin and a random shitcoin claiming to change the world or be the next Bitcoin or Ethereum. These clowns will end up shilling certain altcoins they 'believe' in and the herd will follow. Perfect environment for McAfee style pump and dumps.

I think you're missing the bigger picture here. Admittedly, a country such as Venezuela can't do much on its own, but in that region there are plenty of more countries that are going through similar problems, and they all contribute to a growing overall demand for Bitcoin.

The lowest class (the people with $6.70 monthly you are referring to) aren't those who actually buy into Bitcoin, but the classes above them. People with money have the most to lose but also the most incentive to protect that what is left of their wealth. I'm certain that we haven't even seen 1% of what these countries are capable of in terms of Bitcoin adoption.

It's both Circle and Coinbase being the main entities behind USDC. https://www.centre.io/usdc

It's an interesting topic for sure, because Vitalik has always been against economical abstraction, but it's obvious that he wants you to buy Ether in order to play around with tokens running on top of Ethereum. What Vitalik wants, that happens. I don't think he will ever allow fees to be paid in the tokens people use instead of being forced to always have a little bit of Ether in your wallet.

I read an article like a few months ago where TRON was said to be free to use (i.e. that there are no fees). If that's actually the case, then their USDT tokens can be transferred natively without having TRON in your wallet.

Craig is an absolute lunatic. I am not exactly sure what his end game is, but I'm more and more convinced that he is not interested in Bitcoin itself, but more so to turn this whole ecosystem into one pile of rubbish. It's purely speculation on my end, but it could very well be that he is a government or banking shill.

I remember how people made fun of Jihan saying that he is a Blockstream spy, but he might actually have a point there.

What's the point of hiding? How about not having paid tax over close to 1 million Bitcoins, and that for nearly a decade now? How about governments internally having put a price on his head?

The great innovation you are referring to is something that has the potential to significantly disrupt the power of the governments with their firmly isolated financial systems. If satoshi ever pops up somewhere, he won't be able to enjoy his freedom anymore because governments will throw him in prison and seize all his coins.

Satoshi has everything to lose by going public at this stage, but everything to gain by patiently waiting for Bitcoin to be that world reserve currency.

Amazon didn't integrate anything. I don't even think Amazon is aware of this at all. 

It's just a browser extension you can link to pretty much any site accepting similar legacy payment options. It's still cool, but less cool than it looks.

I have been using PurseIO for over a year now, and while they are a big blocker service, they do offer a very useful service to Bitcoiners to buy any item from Amazon with discounts up to 25%, now that's what I consider super cool.

In a way it does, because you are donating traffic to them by posting an article that you consider clickbait, which you don't seem to like. In other words, their 'clickbait' articles do their job, and this will lead to news outlets releasing more of these articles instead of less.

Nothing wrong with being a purist, but the thing that put me off was how I started following the same path as Tone Vays, which I find to be an idiot, and that's not cool at all, and actually a display of pure ignorance.

Bitcoin isn't the wonder pill that solves every pressing problem, and probably never will be. Bitcoin is extremely good in doing one thing right, and that's more than enough. Gold for example hasn't much utility to it, yet it's worth $8 trillion. This shows that doing one thing right (store of value in Gold's case) is more than enough to gain value. Bitcoin can do that much better.

Look at how popular altcoin exchanges are. More demand for altcoins translates to more demand for Bitcoin, because that's what you need to trade them.

Imagine how that was for people who bought their first coins in 2010/2011. If you told them that Bitcoin would reach $1000 in 3 years, they would probably burst out laughing because it's so hard for people to fathom how something that's worth a few bucks can be worth that much.

I actually had a similar experience with a close internet buddy of mine who is an Ethereum fanboy. He kept repeating that its price would explode well beyond $100 when it was still below $10, which I (with my Bitcoin maximalist cap on) thought wasn't possible because everything at that point for me was a shitcoin and worth zero.

I am sure that he actually believed in Ethereum but was just speculating about its price, but still, he was right and I was wrong. I never ever again will underestimate any coin in terms of price action.

I'm not sure if popularity is the right term to use, especially with how more and more people start to dislike him for who he is, even outside the world of crypto.

The thing that makes him interesting is how millions and millions of people like to read and talk about bad boys, because that's interesting. That's directly the main reason for CSW to keep suing people, threaten exchanges to initiate double spend attacks, dump BTC down to $1000, etc. Most people don't like CSW, but they still want to know what he is up to, and news outlets happily tap into that demand and release all sorts of rubbish articles.

For them bad publicity is good publicity because it introduces them to a much larger audience.

I somehow overlooked his Yobit signature.

You are absolutely right, this dude in his very post states that they should stop behaving like scammers, yet he actually promotos the exchange with a flashy signature ad. It's like; I don't care if people get scammed as long as I get the payment from the campaign I consider to be a scam. This makes him a hypocrite and actually very shady.

Or just don't report any taxes in this specific case. Seriously, if you try to do the good thing but don't have any documents, screenshots, spreadsheets, etc, you're basically fucked.

The government doesn't care about how much of a brave citizen you try to be by reporting your taxes in all honesty, they are out to extort you till they have what they (very wrongly) think you owe them. My motto is; what the government doesn't know can't hurt you, financially or physically. We are a bunch of criminals and tax evaders from their perspective, so we can only do wrong.  

As for the altcoins you still have, wait for the next bull run and convert them to BTC, that's the smartest thing to do. I do that too with the wide variety of shit forks that I still haven't claimed. Even the worst possible shit coins pump hard against their BTC pair, so there isn't much to lose here.

One way or another, most hardforks will fail anyway, and that money will find its way back to Bitcoin at a later stage.

The main positive side to Bitcoin and BCash is that we can now see off-chain scaling in action, and on-chain scaling. People won't ever have to ask themselves 'what if on-chain scaling could work, but because we're not putting it to the test, we don't know'. Here is the test.

I am almost 100% that on-chain scaling is not going to work long term speaking, but there apparently are people who do think it will work, so this is the best way for them to be proven wrong.

It's so funny how news outlets manage to blow up an innocent list of companies Serena Williams has invested in.  

Coinbase offers a decent growth opportunity, but that's really it. It makes sense to invest in one of the largest businesses in a growing industry, but that doesn't change the fact that Coinbase is just one business her firm invested in from the over 30 that the list counts. But then again, Coinbase is also losing market share quite rapidly, so we'll see how this plays out in the future.

I rather kiss CZ's ass for equity in Binance.

How can you be so sure of that? Satoshi might just not have access to his coins anymore and still be around. It wouldn't surprise me if turns out that Satoshi didn't want to have that much of an economical advantage over the rest, therefore he erased his private keys and whatnot.

Just because coins don't move it doesn't mean that they are lost, or the owners are dead. Who knows, Satoshi might hold till Bitcoin becomes the world reserve currency, and then starts playing with them.

That to me seems to be a case of greed too. You even refer to it as being able to claim big profits. Everything we do here is driven by greed one way or another. I legit believe that greed is good, but it's good as long as you control it and don't marry with the coin or legacy asset you invest in, otherwise it will work against you.

Trading for most people is the same. They profit a few times, like the taste of it, then trade more, lose, then try to win it back and lose even more. If you can't see every individual trade (regardless of the trade being a losing or profitable one) as a new start, you are basically guaranteed to lose your funds in the long run.

Platforms as Bitmex made things even worse with how trading has actually become more similar to gambling than ever before. 100x leverage requires a 1% move to wipe out your entire balance, and in the crypto market that can happen literally a second after you opened your position.

Fundamental analysis hasn't been worth much for people who look to make a short to medium term trade/investment. Altcoins are perfect examples of how fundamental analysis isn't doing what it should be doing. If altcoins fundamentally suck hard, which the far majority do, they shouldn't increase in value, but they still do.

I doubt most of the "experts" have a wide range of connections, or at least, not connections that are valuable in a market like this, otherwise they wouldn't be wrong so many times, and as we have seen, they have no power over the price in any shape or form. There is not much of a difference between an "expert" such as Mike Novogratz and you. Mike lost almost a hundred million dollars in paper value. If he was such an expert, this wouldn't happen.

I guess that he's referring to how older people have fewer years left to live and that they won't be able to benefit from Bitcoin when it eventually peaks.

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In the end, all these entities have been wrong with their predictions, before and after the bull run, so why should we pay attention to any of their current predictions? People with little to no exposure to Bitcoin talking big are nothing more than a bunch of annoying flies. Just like that hyperwave idiot thinking that we will drop below $1000 before we can finally think about a bottom.

He doesn't understand that dropping below $1000 from where we are today isn't something to look forward to, but rather something that we should fear. If we drop to that level something has changed and the demand that we thought was relatively high ends up being hot air. I would buy that dip in an instant, but it's not something I feel comfortable with.

The only thing I can see drag the price down to $1000 is when Tether implodes and suddenly all Tethers are worthless tokens.

Bitcoin is actually better in almost all aspects already. Gold's all time high was reached in 2011 and peaked at just over $1800. Currently it hovers just under $1300 (which is a level Gold has been struggling with for over 5 years) and it doesn't seem to be willing to leave it behind for good.

As for the money aspect, it's pretty useless as money aside from high value transactions that are settled physically, but I don't consider that to be a function as money. Every physical object with value can be used like that (i.e. paintings, cars, watches, etc). Bitcoin has everything going for itself to at least usurp 50% of its total market cap.

The thing with Gold is that this asset is absolute in the sense that nothing will be able to replace it as precious metal. This gives people a lot of confidence to park their capital in Gold for decades. Bitcoin has to catch up there to obtain a similar form of absoluteness.

People are shilling these exchanges on social media, so it doesn't surprise me that newbies fall for it with how they don't yet know how crappy exchanges can really be. Another thing is that most popular exchanges haven't every crap coin listed, which exchanges like bitebtc have, and let these crap coins be what newbies are interested in.

Reading the title can be helpful, some times.