I noticed that in the more recent weeks a few Brazilian exchanges started generating insane volumes out of nothing, which is very suspicious.

I am quite certain that the far majority of these volumes are wash trading to attract attention and rank up their exchange. Faking volumes is a cheap and easy method to market yourself as exchange, and it started to really take off in the last 12 or so months.

Most of the actual demand is still coming from western countries, and even if there is a slight uptick in demand in countries such as Brazil, it's not nearly enough to positively affect the price.

One example is that when you buy Bitcoin at $3000 and sell at $5000, you pay tax over $2000 in profits. If you have done multiple trades throughout the year, you add the value of all the profits you made and pay tax based on that. The shitty part is that in some countries they punish you extra for reporting higher profits. Rats they are.

In my case I also have to pay tax over the value of my entire wealth, and the way it works is that the value is calculated based on the total value on first of January. The higher the price of Bitcoin is on January the first, the more tax I end up paying. In that regard, it comes quite handy that Bitcoin always tends to crash in late December.

That cracked me up hard, it's so true.

Currently SBI CEO is betting on XRP to become a currency used by all banks in Japan. It seems that they aren't exactly sure what coin to support. They said about BCash that it would be a globally accepted currency, and that they would do everything they can to make this become reality. If this is a sign of how every coin they predict will do well turns into shit, then I already feel bad for XRP. 

It seems that the delisting hype isn't only affecting BSV anymore.

SBI Group delisted BCash; https://www.newsbtc.com/2019/04/16/bitcoin-cash-bch-delisted-from-japans-sbi-virtual-currencies-exchange/

This is a big deal considering how much of a home Japan is for Roger and his merchant adoption.

Make this ecosystem healthy again! 

Lol. Just because people are talking about a bull run, doesn't mean it will actually happen. If that was the case, we would have seen a massive bull run last year, because every newbie and self claimed expert was talking about it, but we went down hard instead. If people become overly optimistic, it's more likely that we'll head to the other direction. Dumb money has always been a reliable counter indicator.

Also, good news in a bear market has no relevance with how the bearish sentiment instantly nullifies anything of positive nature. The only news that people are waiting for is an approval of Bakkt or an ETF, everything else related to Bitcoin's fundamentals is not of interest to them because it doesn't affect the price positively in the near term.

Uh, the risk tied to Bitcoin has never been as low as it is today. The 2015 bear market was scary as heck, while the current bear market with the improved fundamentals offered me a fantastic buying opportunity. People's confidence in the market reflects that too, because regardless of how hard we fell last year, there was still a lot of optimism, while in 2015 there was no such a thing at all.

Not investing in Bitcoin is a way bigger risk than investing in it. Even if you don't like it, but secretly think there is potential, owning a few % of it won't cause you to go bankrupt would Bitcoin go to zero overnight.

Bitcoin doesn't give a single shit about BSV. It requires one semi large BTC pool to absolutely wreck their chain.

What people don't understand is that BSV is being supported by a hardcore group of nutters thinking that big blocks are the only way to scale. They will not enter Bitcoin but rather continue licking CSW's arse. The only coin that gains something by exchanges delisting BSV is BCash, because they are getting rid of a competing chain.

I am glad that these baboons have their own chain to support, because the last thing we need in Bitcoin is to have them come back and start making problems again.

OTC is just referred to as off-spot-exchange trade.

It can be you and me doing a trade directly (P2P), you buying from a miner or whale directly (P2P), or you can have an OTC desk connecting buyers and sellers. In case of the latter, the service provided by OTC desks differs from platform to platform. Some only do the matching part, and some require you to send them the coins and fiat in order to settle the transaction.

The most fascinating part about OTC trades are the volumes we can only speculate about, which is directly one of the main reasons why some large players prefer to avoid spot exchanges.

Kraken is about to delist them as well, and I hope plenty more services/exchange will follow.

I wonder if Roger will take it easy now the community has clearly spoken against those who try to deceive others. I honestly believe that Roger inflicted more harm on actual users than CSW with how he scammed people making them believe they were buying Bitcoin, but actually bought BCash. He has also been contacting merchants tempting them to remove BTC as payment option.

Hope BCash gets delisted too.

Putting the politics aside, there is basically no incentive for anyone to use services like these anymore. There are so many sleek mobile wallet clients out there that people can use today, that you would expect people to slowly but surely shift away from everything related to online services. Perhaps people are too lazy to do so, who knows.

The interesting part is that BTC dot com was one of the very first players in crypto to actually support native Segwit, which even some of the main Bitcoin clients to this day still don't.

It's a very difficult task to have two governments agree on something. It's exponentially harder to have more than two governments agree on something. It's mission impossible to have the whole world ban Bitcoin. Good luck with that.  

Russia and crypto news is just as reliable as McAfee's manhood prediction.

Watching orderbooks isn't that useful with how easy to manipulate they are, and the market movers on most exchanges also enjoy a hidden order feature.

The best thing in this case is that it doesn't cost anyone a penny to spoof orderbooks, which is something whales over at Bitfinex used to do a lot in the past. I'm sure that some people remember the whale who was spoofing Bitfinex's book with a +10,000BTC buy order above $7000 last year. The price went down hard afterwards. 

You are basically referring to buy low sell high, right? It depends on the trend and your time horizon for it to be profitable.

If you bought into the market above the $10,000 level in 2018 thinking it offers a good longer term investment opportunity, you might be up for an unpleasant surprise. Time in this case will not help you, and the only thing that you are left with is your will to hold. There aren't that many people here capable of holding through a bear market for such a long period of time.

Based on the trend, it makes more sense to be a bit more flexible with your trades and consider shorting one or more crypto currencies (chances are that you're too late with that already). It would have made you a whole lot more than holding through a bear market, which essentially is you losing out on a precious opportunity to make more Bitcoin.

I doubt we'll see the price break through the $6000 level directly. We'll need a good number of attempts to get rid of the selling pressure around that level. If you also take into consideration that we have never gone up this much in a bear market without correcting, it makes a correction even more likely to take place around $6000.

Don't forget that we also have to deal with a lot of potential selling pressure from coins accumulated far below the current levels, and when these investors/traders feel that the momentum is running out of steam, they'll dump. $6000 is a round psychological number, and with the support it offered last year, it's going to be a major hurdle this year.

We'll see what happens, but for now at least, the bullish momentum is still present.

It's not their fault as long as they aren't selling their coins. People need to differentiate actual losses from paper losses. If you bought earlier this year, you are up right now, regardless if someone cashed out profits, and as long as the price keeps going up, that's the case.

2017's bull run made almost everyone win, regardless of people flat out gambling or investing based on fundamentals. That's the power of a bull run, and these mass profits attract even more capital because people love to buy something that has gone up a lot already.

Bitcoin is up ~35% this year, which is quite a solid achievement considering that we're technically still in a bear market. If you lost money with Bitcoin this year, then you have to look in the mirror and rethink why you are here in the first place.

It doesn't. In all cases, regulated markets have been subjected to manipulation too, people just don't read much about it because it's done professionally.

The very fact that we currently have so many exchanges competing with each other, makes it way harder for one entity to force its will upon the global price, while that back in the days was much easier to do. I'm not saying there is no manipulation right now, but those who are doing it only succeed in the very short term.

Every attempt to break up or down will be corrected by an even wealthier entity not long after, and the rest of the market follows because the charts indicate a trend that they will respect.

Bitcoin is a global currency that enables 24/7 interaction. I would steer clear of any regulated body trying to isolate the local market from the rest of the world.

I didn't hear all that many people complain about intermediaries before Bitcoin existed.

I think the main aspect is that Bitcoin and the rest of crypto has forced financial institutions to offer a fairer service, and have more eye for their clients, which I have definitely seen take place. I don't think it's coincidence that my bank got so much more friendly and cheaper with their services after Bitcoin's invention.

Banks had free game, and now they have a robust competitor in the industry, and this competitor forces them to improve and offer better services at lower cost.

Gains. I didn't even like Bitcoin back when I first entered the crypto world, and the whole idea behind it was even less of a thing for me. I only used Bitcoin as a way to get my BTC-E account topped up with fiat to buy Litecoin, which at that point was my favorite coin.

After that I rekt myself brutally by investing in the worst possible shitcoins, and that's when I slowly started to become a Bitcoin maximalist. I didn't think Bitcoin was anything special because of how slow it was compared to some of the other coins, but that's something every newbie seems to go through at first. I have seen how way more shitcoiners turned into Bitcoin maximalists, and that for a good reason. It's the one and only superior coin.

As for the blockchain in general part, it's pure shit. I have never seen such an empty industry be able to generate this much hype. The main innovation is Bitcoin and other cryptos using a decentralized ledger. Everything else that's centralized doesn't need a blockchain. Databases work way better.

It's always stock market scam, insurance fraud, tax fraud, etc. I legit doubt they are doing this on purpose, because the USD is seen as money and the goal is always to obtain more of it. With Bitcoin it's more speculative where Bitcoin is the actual scam according to them. USD goes in and USD goes out whenever they are satisfied.

Bitcoin needs more time to mature in that regard, but I am quite certain that we will be there eventually. Gold is the main target, sound money the next one. Sure, it's annoying for us Bitcoin enthusiasts reading through these articles, but we are the ones who actually have to prove them wrong, not vice versa.

Bitcoin = hot = clicks = ad revenue.

The only one to be blamed for the false promises is Bakkt, because the CFTC never indicated that they would approve Bakkt within x time frame. Bakkt just assumed that it would be approved before the end of 2018, then before April, etc. They should stop teasing people with these launch dates because it only leads to disappointment.

On top of that, Bakkt changed their proposal more than once, which requires the CFTC to review the whole proposal from scratch. Patience.