It all comes down to the serverload. Deribit can handle more transactions per second because their servers are less stressed than Bitmex's servers. If you're a relatively smaller pocket trader, Deribit is a very decent alternative, but if you are a whale you will need Bitmex's depth to have your positions fill.

Sure, one could say that they should upgrade their servers and trading engine to allow more transaction throughput, which is a fair point, but this is something that can take a good year to tweak, because every change, regardless of how subtle it is, can change the user experience significantly.

As for their trading desk, it's quite odd that they openly admit to actually have their own market makers trading, but Deribit may have one operating too, which they don't tell anyone about. I by default assume that regardless of the exchange I use (spot or derivatives), the exchange is trading against its users. Why wouldn't they? They can front run anyone's orders, see how much fiat is entering or leaving, etc.

Not only that, but all this speculation is based on a bill proposal that isn't even accepted yet, nor do we not know if it will. As always, news outlets are contributing to this nonsense by releasing articles that are purely based on empty speculation, and people here and on other social media platforms happily jump on it to further exaggerate this whole situation.

In the end, these measures will not have any sort of effect on the growing OTC market in China, and I'm quite certain that the government(s) there understand that. That's why I personally doubt the bill will be accepted, but it's always better to be sure and wait for what is going to happen in the forthcoming months.

Bitmain has quite a powerful lobby in China, so we'll see what happens.

Mining is a process of value creation, which is something governments want to subject to KYC and all that nonsense too. This is also why Ebay and PayPal are quite harsh on people selling mining equipment. It's super silly if you think about it, but this is how governments think they can somewhat control this ecosystem.

Considering that you can only mine Bitcoin with specialized hardware, it's easy for governments to enforce these measures, while it's way harder to do it with businesses selling GPU's, because you can't subject every buyer of one single unit to go through this nonsense. It however wouldn't surprise me if eventually we'll see the same happen to bulk GPU purchases. We haven't seen the worst side of regulations yet.

You are the type of person people like Tom Lee target with super bullish forecasts.

Investors appreciate realistic predictions, not ones that are so obviously designed to appeal to get rich quick noobies. 2018 was a year where every single perma bull constantly threw around with bullish predictions, and what did it yield? The price went down more and more the closer we came to the end of the year. 

A good crypto year can also be one that goes down continuously, you just need to know how to play the market. Nowadays there are so many platforms allowing you to short the price of whatever coin, that complaining about price declines is starting to get silly. The trend is the trend until confirmed otherwise, and as long as you go with the trend, you're likely to make profits, regardless of the direction.

Arthur Hayes has skin in the game for sure, but his price predictions should be taken with a truckload of salt. He doesn't even care that much about the price as long as there is enough volatility to keep people trading on Bitmex, and this is something he admitted last year.

If you think further, every exchange owner has been very bullish on Bitcoin and crypto in general, because their business needs a healthy crypto environment to exist. If this space turns into a pile of dust at one point, their income will be gone too, so how can they not be a perma bull? The same applies to mining hardware manufacturers.

As for the cash part; getting rid of cash isn't going to happen in such a short period of time, even if the goverments did everything in their power to wipe it out entirely. It will require a process of decades, and even then there will still be trillions worth of it circulating worldwide. But even if they manage to impose a total ban of cash, they also need to get rid of physical Gold, because it's just as decentralized, but slightly less convenient.

I am still short just under $5000 and will keep the short open as insurance, but the fact that Tether printed like 300 million USDT makes me less confident about major correction. This is new money entering the system, which we haven't seen in quite a long time. This somewhat reminds me of what happened just before we broke $6000 last year. Tether took like 500 million USDT out of circulation, where not long after that, the price tanked badly.

CZ of Binance very recently said that new money in form of stablecoins is entering his exchange, and with how more USDT is being printed, this doesn't come as a surprise. We'll see where it goes, but being bearish for too long can be harmful too.

Without even knowing what the topic was about, I could just tell that this was related to a scam by just looking at the name of the service. Seriously, what service is going to name itself drep-wallet? It's retarded. It boggles my mind that people still fall for this shit and waste time posting on forums asking whether or not it's legit.

Some sites even have 'real' in their domain name, lol. How desperate must one be to convince others that the service is real? 

What's the point of comparing these 'lower' interest rates to the insane/unrealistic ones that ponzis offer? You're basically comparing an entity trying to do it the right way to an entity that's outright trying to scam you. On top of that, the interest rates are actually still somewhat on the higher side being 6%.

The highest interest rate my bank offers for my money is 1.8% if I lock it up for 2 years, and like 0.1% over my regular savings that I can access at any time of the day. The highest ever interest rate my bank offered me was almost 5% but these good times are over unfortunately.

If they haven't been able to deliver during the bull run, which is the most financially incentivizing time frame to have developers work, chances are there won't be any development during a bear market, where the funds of the projects are running out fast.

The shitty nature of this market is that people have figured out that shitcoin prices go up harder than Bitcoin's price during a bull run, therefore parking funds in Bitcoin is the least interesting option for them. Bitcoin's base pairs against shitcoins are donating free pumps and dumps to those who want to bank on it. Bitcoin isn't going anywhere, and its price will keep pumping, so will most shitcoins do.

It's not all that bad though, the more shitcoins there are, the more demand there is for Bitcoin, because that's what you need to buy and trade them. If the IEO hype takes off, which I think it will with some more positive momentum, Bitcoin will be pumped through the roof just as hard as it did back in 2017.

The thing that the majority of the Bitcoin maximalists ignore is how neutral most of the new entrants are. They haven't been here long enough to actually know what it means to have Bitcoin be that superior currency, to be the most secure network, to have the network effect play a massive role, etc.

Most people see crypto currencies as a new piece of tech they put in the same category as every flashy tech company trying to solve a problem, and they genuinely believe that they may succeed, while we know that most ICO's and altcoins are utter garbage and will fail hard. I don't really mind it because I know it's only a matter of time for them to be proven wrong and appreciate Bitcoin for what it is.

Bitcoiners are too sensitive and believe that everything governments do is being done to push back Bitcoin, while I don't think that's the case at all. It's mainly just ignorance from their side, and I can't blame them for that. It's easy for average joes to forget what this space is about when all they see the media report about is related to pumps and dumps.

Don't believe in fairy tales.

These entities value their profit margins more than the coin they mine or the country they operate in. They'll pretend to create jobs and whatnot, but the reality is very different, and we have seen that already in countries such as Canada and certain states within the US. Miners were allowed to settle there in return for job creation, but nothing of this actually happened.

The fact that we still talk about Bitmain shows that a lot needs to happen for it to be overtaken. They are losing dominance in the crypto space, but it's quite a slow process. I would have expected legacy entities to be more aggressive, but it seems that they still consider this space to be too much of a risky bet rather than a profitable opportunity.

It's near impossible to escape when all eyes are literally pointed at you. It wouldn't surprise me if there were agents located very near the building to capture him if there was ever an escape attempt. The risk isn't worth the 'safety' he enjoyed within the embassy. On top of that, every bit if data going in and out of the embassy might be filtered, so even if he uses TOR and whatnot, he always has to assume that whatever he ends up doing, agencies very likely know what's going on.

I'm not necessarily for or against Assange, but it's quite interesting to see how popular he and WikiLeaks are within the Bitcoin ecosystem. The donations they received in Bitcoin throughout the years are mind bogglingly high.

It works both ways though. Last year it were the non crypto news outlets that were bragging about how legacy assets outperforming Bitcoin. It also gave them a lot of ammo to trash Bitcoin's currency and store of value aspect, because what currency and store of value tanks with +80% in such a short period of time? They referred to it as a bubble, and it actually was at that point.

I have seen plenty. It was also put against Gold's troy ounce value when Bitcoin went over the $1000 level in 2017. First it was worth as much as a troy ounce of Gold, then twice as much, etc. News outlets were really milking these events at that point. We also had a period where Bitcoin's market cap was put against that of PayPal, MasterCard, Visa, etc. There was no shortage of Bitcoin vs legacy asset reports.

It's quite funny how people go nuts over a few coin movements. In most cases when we see these movements nothing happens; orderbooks don't change, short/long ratios don't change, etc. It's such an easy way for news outlets to try to scare people thinking there will be a dump or whatever. Just get over it.

The most obvious hoax articles were how news outlets made people believe there was a whale holding over 500,000BTC, which later turns out to be Coinbase relocating their funds, and it turned out to concern almost 900,000BTC in the end. The whales news outlets refer to are mostly exchanges or other large services, but that's not nearly as exciting as a mysterious whale "accumulating" or "dumping" an insane number of coins.

These Twitter whale watchers are cool and all, but take them with a truckload of salt. It wouldn't even surprise me if exchanges mix their coins by sending them to X exchange and receive the same amount back from Y exchange.

The general rule is that when a "guru" or "expert" is selling whatever form of service that allows people to benefit from their trades, it's mostly a pile of dog shit.

I watched a recent interview where Arthur Hayes (CEO of Bitmex) was asked why they don't release their own in-house token, and his answer was that it largely comes down to the fact that it doesn't only create certain legal problems, but more importantly, they don't need the money. This part is very important. An entity that is successful generates enough money on its own, therefore doesn't need to seek for external capital.

All these signal groups and whatnot are the trash side of trading in general. It's also a huge thing within the stock and forex market where a bunch of retarded clowns pretend to be experts sell signals and courses.

The only tough thing about trading is the understanding people have to actually trade any sort of market. If that understanding is present, it's actually very easy to trade (easy to trade doesn't mean easy to profit, these are two different things), and you don't have to lose much sleep over it. Having trading affect your sleeping schedule either means you're too much of a hardcore trader, or you have too much money at risk.

The great thing about crypto is that if you play it right, you only need a few trades a year to potentially make solid gains. You don't have to trade every single day/opportunity. People forcing themselves to trade every single day/opportunity is where they go wrong and lose a lot of money.

The CFTC will approve it, no doubt about that, but the thing here is that Bakkt is such a tiny dot, that there is next to no priority to it from the side of the CFTC. It may be approved next month or next year, we can't do anything other than continue to patiently wait for it. There is no deadline as to when the CFTC has to make a decision.

I can however understand why people get so annoyed by all this Bakkt news while they still don't have an approval. Everything they do right now means that Bakkt knows it will be approved, but the time aspect is the only thing they can't control. Good thing is that the CFTC chairman is quite bullish on Bitcoin, which can't be said about the SEC chairman. It makes an approval even more likely. Patience. 

Bitcoin too young to be used by terrorists....... 

The younger Bitcoin is, the more 'anonymity' criminals of all sorts enjoy. By the time Bitcoin is mature enough, agencies around the world have catched up to such degree, that there basically is no 'anonymity' left. I think it's safe to say that we're very close to that point already.

In the end, I honestly don't care who uses Bitcoin. It's a fucking currency of freedom. Anyone can use it, that's what makes Bitcoin such a powerful tool.

It's incredibly hard to get money to exit the Chinese borders, and Bitcoin hasn't changed much about it at all. Instead, it allowed Chinese manufacturers of mining equipment to have money enter China instead of leaving it.

I read about how Bitcoin's price within the OTC market in China comes with a mild premium, while usually these premiums within the western OTC market are discounts. These Chinese OTC premiums are the direct result of how difficult it is to get money to exit the system, therefore people are ready to pay that premium. Owning Bitcoin offers people the freedom they need to send it to foreign exchanges and trade their way up. Bitcoin 'exits', but the fiat the coins are bought with stays in China.

Will Tone Vays please stand up?

This fool of a Bitcoin maximalist is such a shit stain within this community. He has a trading series on Youtube called 'trading Bitcoin', while he admitted to not be trading at all, lol. He just opens a few positions a year and that's what he's happy with, the hypocrite.

Bitcoin will only bottom when altcoins die according to him, which cracks me up hard. The things he hate the most are actually one of the main contributors of demand for Bitcoin. If altcoins die, say goodbye to at least a quarter of Bitcoin's global demand. Millions of coins will find their way to the spot market because they are 'useless' then. What happens with the price mr smart?

I'm not discarding the possibility of another giant wick down, but considering that the 200 wma moves up continuously, it's getting increasingly harder to actually reach the $31xx area, even as flash wick. As always, when the market is going up people become overly bullish, and when the price is going down people become overly bearish.