It's safe to say that the panic selling noobs who sold in early 2018 are looking back more than satisfied, while those hodling were regretting not having sold at "low" prices such as $10,000, then $8000, then $6000, etc.

Bear markets are an amazing opportunity to increase your coins by buying back the coins you sold before. I too could have done a way better job utilizing the bear market, but at least I learned from it and know that the next bull-bear cycle will do me well.

As for the controlling the market part, who are you referring to? The larger this market grows, the harder it becomes to control it. People can point at institutions all day long, but where is the evidence? I'm certain that institutions are just as afraid of you guys as you guys are afraid of institutions.

Bitcoin pumping and dumping hard seems pretty normal to me. Chaos in the market is the only thing that Bitcoin and crypto in general has going for it right now. How else will it signal that it's alive? If Bitcoin isn't doing anything the interest in it decreases and we have seen that more than once already, and this will continue till utility wins it over the speculative nature. At that point people will prefer relative stability.

I miss the good old days where 1000-2000BTC buy and sell walls were a common occurrence. Investors are probably afraid of exchanges due to all the hacks and whatnot, therefore spread out their funds over multiple exchanges, which means that smart money understands that centralized exchanges are shit, while dumb money continues to ignore red flags and for that reason people continue to rekt themselves.

I haven't seen much more development take place in the current beark market. Everything that most serious projects did and do right now was planned well before the bear market even initiated.

People tend to give a positive twist to anything they see as negative, and the bear market versus the buidl mentality isn't any different. On top of that, after a bear market we're due for another bull market, and all the shitty scam projects and noobs will be back gambling their credit and live savings. Every bull run results in more mainstream adoption and thus more get rich quick noobs. They are here to stay.

Changelly tends to halt conversions when they are on the losing end of the trade. With how volatile the prices have been in the last weeks, it's quite possible that the price went down and Changelly decided to no longer honor the agreement.

I had to deal with this when I tried to use their service to convert fork coins to BTC. One time the transaction failed, and one time they did end up sending me the BTC, but only after the fork coins went up in value, which took like 6 hours.

There have been so many complaints about Yobit, and that for years now, that people have to ask themselves who scams who here. If you send funds to an exchange that's super shady, you're playing Russian roulette with your funds, period.

Sure, it sucks hard that OP lost money, but come on, it's known that exchanges like Yobit thrive on people they keep ignoring in the hope that they finally drop their case and accept their loss. They do this to tens of thousands of people, where most of the amounts concerned are too insignificant for people to publicly complain about, so the number of victims is orders of magnitude higher than the number of complains on internet.

Why don't you explain him what your perspective on this matter is? We're here to help each other out and share knowledge, which you are definitely capable of and could have done already. It might not be an original question in your book, but what is an original question that we see pop up on this forum nowadays? On top of that, opinions can change the further we see Bitcoin progress, so it's still a valid question in the end.

He somewhat shared his concern, which you think is not valid, so what's your vision when it comes to the fees and the sustainability of the POW aspect of Bitcoin in the long run?

It's a guessing game. In all cases we see the mainstream media talk down on Bitcoin after a sweet increase. It's either manipulation, one single entity playing with the market, rogue governments taking positions, etc. One thing is certain, the mainstream media mostly is very wrong with their analysis, and it wouldn't surprise me that the same is the case right now.

The most probable reason for this increase is the breakout of the ascending triangle we were in for months. A breakout would net a $1000ish increase, and we got exactly that. The only thing that wasn't certain was when it would break out with how it easily could have taken a few more weeks for the breakout to initiate.

Speculators happily outbid basic users to get that first next block confirmation. It might get worse if the price pumps further because of how speculators will then try to outbid each other, and this could cause the fees to be pushed to levels well beyond a regular situation with the same number of unconfirmed transactions.

Speculators also paid up for the fees during the 2017 bull run. Their potential profits were so large that a $50-$100 fee was peanuts to them. It's party time for miners, but a bad situation for basic users trying to get their transaction confirmed.

In the end, current network congestion is a much needed test for Bitcoin and Segwit. As far as I can see, the fees are not that extreme. If the fees do end up going towards something that most people consider extreme, it will only boost Segwit adoption because exchanges will be forced to offer users a better user experience.

Investors who got rekt during the bear market did that to themselves. It's pretty much rule nr1 that regardless of the project you invest in, heavily depends on the market sentiment. Even if your project has the best possible fundamentals, it will be turned into a pile of rubbish the moment Bitcoin drags down the entire ecosystem with it.

This isn't the stock market where you have a business generating revenue and profit streams. I'm really happy that I never invested in a project that aims to do x but doesn't deliver in the end. Buying spot greatly outperforms an investment in any type of crypto related business/project by orders of magnitude.

If you want to invest in projects anyway, then wait for the bull market and buy into a random token tied to the project and you're in the profits. Back in 2017 losing money was harder than making money. Everything mooned hard.

The volumes are quite nice actually. If you focus on Bitstamp, Kraken and Coinbase Pro, you'll see that there are waves of buy orders coming through that signal demand. Some investors trade based on confirmations, and with how we broke through all previous local lower highs with such a fierce candle, they see that as a start of an up trend.

It's going to be interesting to see at what level the weekly candle closes. This could very well indicate a trend reversal with the charts actually backing it. I am currently short when it comes to trading, but I stacked up quite some satoshis under $4000 for long term holding purposes, so I am good either way.

I wish this wouldn't happen (i.e. people investing with borrowed money) but it's certainly reality with how the price has gone up. Retailers are very sentiment driven, therefore buy because the price goes up, and sell or not buy because the price is going down. I was like that too in the very beginning. I bought the pumps and sold the dumps.

The funny thing about retailers is when they start wondering why the price is going down when they buy and up when they sell. It doesn't come up in their mind to do the exact opposite after so many similar mistakes.

I'm sure that most people wishing fiat to implode are sitting at home all day staring at the crypto price tickers. I'm also sure that they don't even hold that much in crypto assets. What these baboons don't realize is that you don't gain anything if fiat implodes and the price tickers show 100-1000% gains. All that happens is that the price adjusts itself to levels where your purchasing power is still identical to what it was before the implosion.

Bitcoin being digital Gold is already a massive utility, and for most people that's the only thing that matters since they don't use Bitcoin as a currency. Bitcoin is too precious to spend, unless you're replacing what you spend, but that makes it less of a day to day currency.

That also solves the double spending attacks on ATM's because some still offer zero confirmation payouts. Very recently a group of criminals managed to steal very large sums of money repeatedly by double spending, which some said it's the fault of the ATM operator, which is partly true, but a business wants to offer convenience in form of speed, and that convenience comes with a very high risk, one that Lightning eliminates.

Reading about how creative people are with Lightning apps and other developments makes me feel as excited as I was back in 2013 where merchants accepting Bitcoin was still super duper cool.

Fun fact, Roger Ver and Charlie Lee made a friendly bet 7ish months ago where Roger said that he doesn't believe more than 1000 merchants are accepting Lightning payments in 18 months. Well. He lost big time. Somewhere this or next year he'll wear a Lightning or Blockstream shirt. Can't wait.

The ascending triangle broke out and pumped nicely to where it will face a lot resistance. Got my short in at ~$4900 and now I am waiting for gravity to do its work. I am however not sure yet where I'll cash out considering the (real) volumes show some decent buying waves.

CME yesterday generated 12,000 contracts worth 50,000BTC and it looks like they'll easily go over that today. People saying that CME doesn't play a role have to open their eyes and start to acknowledge that this fake Bitcoin platform has a firm say in this market.

The SEC always has a choice, where ultimately, they can continue to say no to Bitcoin.

People here don't seem to understand that they have a ~$4 trillion ETF market to protect. The SEC doesn't lose one single second of sleep over Bitcoin not being granted an ETF, and why would they? It definitely seems that people in the crypto space badly want this ETF, while the SEC rather not wastes its time looking at Bitcoin at all.

Bitcoin's market has to go through years of maturation in every field to make the SEC seriously consider an ETF approval, and I can't blame them. The very fact that exchanges are massively inflating their volumes doesn't help at all. It just fuels the SEC's 'Bitcoin is being manipulated' narrative.

It's safe to say that most of the funds that people send to Binance come from fiat exchanges like Coinbase, and they are withdrawn back to fiat exchanges like Coinbase. In other words, there is no such a thing as anonymity, especially not when you take into consideration that the majority of the people don't even understand what coin taint really is.

I think that some exchanges might even hand over user data to each other in order to prevent illicit acitivity. It's pure speculation from my side, but it's not out of the ordinary considering that Coinbase is the most regulated exchange, and exchanging data happens within the legacy financial industry too.

Coin shuffling has been gaining some momentum lately, which is a good thing, but at the same time, contributes to network cluttering the more popular these privacy enhancing wallets become.

I like the fact that through ChipMixer I can redeem loaded private keys of different amounts that have been created like a day or so before. This makes it more difficult to link it to me than a regular mixing job would, where you either withdraw your coins right after the first confirmation, or wait a couple of hours. In both cases your 'clean' coins move after your initial mixing job.

Bitmex all the way.

I like the fact that I can utilize my Bitcoins to long/short altcoins and get paid out the profits in Bitcoin, which especially during an altcoin season, is a fantastic way to stack up on Bitcoin and enjoy the ride up when it's Bitcoin's time to shine.

The only thing people should carefully read into is what leverage is, and how it works. I still read stories where people wipe out their entire balance not knowing what happened. In my book, 5x is the preferred leverage count, and in some cases 10x, but that's only after a confirmed trend change.

That's definitely true, but the BCash bet was more related to Jihan and his right hand over at Bitmain (which Jihan paid the price for as he got booted from his head position), while their current plan to deploy an insane number of miners seems to be more of a smart business move based on internal consensus, where on top of that, you can't really go wrong with Bitcoin.

Of course, this isn't a guarantee that it will pay off would the market fall down below its current low, but you have to take that risk at the end of the day. China's cheap energy season very likely is an important factor for their plan, so they at least have a financial advantage here.

Investors never really trusted the government there to begin with. All they did was allow themselves to enjoy certain perks in return for their money, and as you can see, it didn't work out at all. I wonder how many of these investors were forced to leave everything behind out of fear. It's such a horrible situation, but one they have themselves to blame for.

I doubt crypto offers any sort of solution, especially when it comes to the poorest of the poorest. Smart money has various other ways to hedge the risk their governments exposes them to, where crypto represents just a fraction of that. I want to see much higher local volumes in order to see crypto play a more significant role over there.