I'm sorry that you lost out. Can you see a pattern forming here? Everyone's trying to spell it out for you.

See if you have a pre early 2014 private key, claim some clams and throw them away if you really can't stop gambling. Destroying free money will feel a whole lot better.

Things will really get interesting when the inflation settles to a more sensible level after future halvings. Ten years and beyond is when there might be some proper deflationary effects if it's still rolling.

Message to future self - look after that prostate. You're not getting any younger.

250,000 jobs? What are they smoking? That's probably more than there are active and regular users of Bitcoin itself. Even the biggest and bloatiest crypto companies like Coinbase can't be employing more a than a few tens, or maybe hundreds, of people.

Pah. We'll see where we're at in 2020. Until then it's all day to day noise. I'll start to sweat when every last big gun tried and failed to get things rolling and then slunk away.

I'm guessing he means bitcoin specific companies, or maybe I'm reaching. It's not a big deal if a retailer falls away. If Bitpay or Coinbase decide payment processing wasn't viable any more then that's a proper hiccup.

The paperwork to issue the shares so people can sell is still in the pipeline. No coloured coins there.

https://twitter.com/grayscaleinvest

The Chinese exchanges have the figures but it depends on whether you want to eventually withdraw fiat. If you're into Euros Kraken is the biggest. Bitfinex is the busiest these days for dollars. Bitstamp is quieter than it used to be.

What are you aiming for by selling your coins? Trading or just cashing out?

All of them. That's what they're for. Choose one with high liquidity though or you might wait a long time to sell.

Spending heavily on dark markets to cheer themselves up?

It could well be possible. Or you could keep an eye on large amounts being deposited by customers and trade against them the moment they hit the button.

Look into the history of Mt Gox if you haven't. There's strong evidence that there was an internal bot that was buying coins with non existent dollars. It carried on buying happily even when the site had supposedly crashed.

I've no idea. If you're talking about them running an exchange, they would be duty bound to provide real time market prices and the correct orders. No one really knows what goes on in the present exchanges. They could be front running client orders, operating fractional reserves, feeding fake info.

I'm sure many are run by upstanding citizens but there's nothing at all to stop them milking everything left, right and centre.

Well, we don't even know whether there are any truly legit exchanges. The whole thing is mired in fog and bollocks. A fair price might arrive one day when there are markets that can be trusted. Until then the whole thing is the plaything of a small number of people who do what they want.

There's zero regulation pertaining to any area of the crypto market hence the hail storm of altcoins that are out to fleece people and the endless pumping and dumping for BTC.  

Forex is a better comparison. There's much less regulation for even the biggest markets compared to stocks.

I'm sure whoever was involved in some of the dodgy coins made a pretty penny but market caps are meaningless. If a developer tried to cash out their premine coin with the multi million dollar market cap they might just about scrape ten to fifty grand before the most markets would fatally vapourise.

I'm not so sure. There must be tens or hundreds of thousands with similar amounts of skill who would take enormous pride in killing it off if they could.

So out of all the skilled people on the planet who could take it apart to either - enrich themselves, have some lulz, prove themselves superior to every one else in the world or do it on behalf of multiple malevolent entities, not a single one has done it because they can't quite be arsed?

That's what I said. Even if it's an instant dump, it's a still a tiny vote of legitimacy that wasn't there before.

Crypto faces an uphill struggle to convince the wider world to trust it.

Bitcoin has been battered relentlessly since day one. The technical failures that occurred such as the hard fork and multi billion coin incident occurred while it was still small. Other coins might have similar vulnerabilities that wouldn't be uncovered until they had proper value. No doubt thousands of people have tried to crack it open and have failed.

It's also gained strength against a backdrop of overwhelming negativity and scepticism and it's seeping into more and more nooks and crannies every day.

That type of trial by fire is just as valuable as the size of the network in building a viable future. No one will ever be able to replicate it and it can't be transferred.

No one's going to risk pouring a similar amount into an unproven system.

There are no shortage of politicians now accepting BTC donations and a few bills have been proposed to allow for payment for taxes in certain states. That is purely using it a vehicle to transit dollars, but it's still something which would've been hard to believe a short while back.

Actually implementing it in the machinations of government is a humongous leap and probably goes against every thing they want, but it might sneak in in a few enlightened places.

Unfortunately humans are the ones who'll be using it with all that entails. Perhaps it might find its true place among unhackable machines dealing with each other. 

You can have the greatest tech ever but it's going to fade away if the services required to interact with it are operated by idiots and scum or if the whole thing is simply unwanted despite its obvious merits.