It's called survival of the fittest.

We're better off saying goodbye to these shitcoin exchanges. If the bear market drags on for another year, I'm certain that exchanges like Bithumb will finally throw the towel in the ring. All they have done so far is onboard more get rich quick noobs instead of people who are actually interested in Bitcoin.

The fact that so many exchanges (Bithumb is amongst them) are faking volumes to trap in noobs tells a lot about how crappy this ecosystem has become. The bar is set higher and higher; soon we'll have exchanges wash trade billions on a daily basis to rank up on CMC's list of top volume exchanges.

We're currently going through an altcoin season, but one that seems to ignore Ether and XRP. It really seems that whoever the groups are behind the shitcoin pumps, they target extremely low liquidity coins. A few million is enough to pump their prices with 20-30% while the same money wouldn't be of much interest to Bitcoin. I would say that such amount is barely enough to increase Bitcoin's price with 1%.

Searches for altcoins are up a lot, so that might explain the increased average joe interest. Average joes buy what goes up, and let it be the shitcoins that are going up now. Some people will rekt themselves hard when the party ends.

I'm not so sure of that. Every well thinking Bitcoiner has utilized the boom and bust cycles to acquire more Bitcoin. In that regard, I would like to say that whales have become wealthier and more powerful than ever before.

Average people on the other hand are as stupid as they have always been; they continuously buy and sell at the wrong moments, and whales know how to make them buy and sell at the wrong times. Bitcoin's wealth distribution is way worse than fiat's wealth distribution, and it's only going to be worse because most people are straight gamblers and don't care about its decentralized nature.

People who value Bitcoin do everything to acquire more. They will get people's coins cheaply and sell them back to them way higher, to then repeat this whole cycle.

If you look around, there is enough pumping going on right now, it just isn't Bitcoin. I would even like to say that Bitcoin is heavily lagging behind in terms of showing signs of a bottom. Altcoin charts look better in that regard, and that gives people the confidence to buy in.

Bitcoin in my opinion needs to break $6000 in order to have its chart look bullish. Everything below $6000 is just not interesting enough for me aside from the short term trading opportunities it offers. I have my short target in mind in case we do break out towards $5000, and I'm certain more people have. If you think logically, the amount of selling pressure between $4500-$5000 will be too much for Bitcoin to swallow, so it's an easy short for me.

Obviously, there are no guarantees that it will be like this, but the probability is quite in my favor, so it's worth a trade.

In other words, you think the price will go either up or down.  

The only positive thing currently is how fiercely the bulls are buying up the dumps, which I didn't expect to continue for this long. Usually you see a breakout either up or down, but it has been trending in the same channel for quite some time now. Good for those using Bitcoin as currency. Not so good for those who are desperately looking for that breakout.

The volumes we see are shockingly high, but also shockingly fake. If you look at Coinbene's volume bars, you'll see how consistent they are. Compare that to the volume bars of exchanges like Bitstamp or Coinbase. The SEC is right about how crappy this ecosystem is. I perfectly understand why they are rejecting all applications.

Hashrate-wise, BCash is by far the largest SHA-256 altcoin, and then we have Bitcoin's hashrate being 28 times higher than BCash's hashrate. I think that says enough. 

https://www.coinwarz.com/network-hashrate-charts/bitcoin-network-hashrate-chart
https://www.coinwarz.com/network-hashrate-charts/bitcoincash-network-hashrate-chart

Admittedly, there aren't many SHA-256 coins left to mine, so people's hashrate will be pointed to Bitcoin.

Top 3;

Bitcoin 48Ehs
BCash 1.7Ehs
BCashSV 0.5Ehs

No need to feel bad for them. It's not that difficult to get an indication of his true nature, so if you ignore that while he has been quite a shady and questionable individual for years now, not just due to his crypto adventure, you're asking for it.

He's wasted. If you look at a few of his recent videos, he can't stop touching his nose. This behavior is quite common amongst coke abusers. I can't tell if hes addicted to the degree he needs to fund his expensive nose candy, but it could very well explain why he is so desperately trying to shill even the most ridiculous ICO scams. I seriously doubt that he would do this if his net worth didn't shrink so badly.

Regarding Andre Yang, he doesn't really seem that interesting to me to be honest. Nothing he stands for tempts me as Bitcoiner to vote for him. I'm certain that more people are like that, and those who aren't into Bitcoin or crypto in general will ignore him anyway.

It's not about physical paper money being light and easy to carry with you wherever you go. It's about the ability that banks have to create digital value out of nothing whenever a client for example asks for a loan. All it requires the bank to create whatever amount of money is to change a few metrics within their database.

---

Meh, the article itself is lame and the site it's listed on too. I get it that you want people to click on your items, but this goes a bit too far.

I know someone who jumped into trading and got rekt completely after 3 weeks of trading, and this happened by placing very tight stops. This is what happens when people don't understand how leverage works. I literally warned that person to not proceed with trading, but did it anyway and this is the result.

The fun part (or the sad part, depending on how you look at it) is that I was blamed for the losses because I didn't want him to profit he said, lol. It's a classic example of how people getting rekt blame external elements and not themselves, which is why they keep losing because they don't know what went wrong. It's very silly but super common amongst get rich quick minded noobies.

The worst noobs are those who made some lucky profits at the very beginning and now think they know how the market works. Meh.

I have been experiencing browser freezes too, but not solely related to Binance. It also happens on Coinbase Pro and Bitstamp. The interesting part is that it happens after like 10 hours of inactivity, while if I refresh the page or interact with the exchange itself these freezes don't happen. It's either related to a not that maxed out PC setup or something within Windows itself. It happens with every popular web browser.

I have my tablets on a stand and have the sites of the aforementioned exchanges open all the time and thus far I haven't experienced one single problem. It's not ideal, but it's ok enough for me since I only track the prices. Most of my trading happens on Bitmex, which doesn't crash on my PC for whatever reason.  

Bitcoin is the first that was actually considered to be digital Gold. Alternative crypto currencies aren't even close to that. If I had to categorize them, they would be similar to fiat currencies. In both cases they are created out of nothing and just because people are foolish enough to buy them they have some sort of a value.

Real estate is good if you want to preserve wealth or create a passive income stream within a steady economy. A financial crisis means people losing jobs, lower overall incomes, etc. This basically puts pressure on your passive income streams out of real estate, so it might not even be that good of an option after all.

I would personally stick to what I have already, which is Bitcoin and fiat. You can't know beforehand what will be the best safe haven to sit in during a financial crisis, not even with Gold that people tend to agree on is a safe haven. It's Russian roulette that you are playing if you try to position yourself well.

I'm not so sure of that actually. All Visa needs to do is to have their entire ecosystem become a smarter and easier to scale database. They don't need a blockchain for that, nor do they feel threatened by crypto. People here want to believe they feel like that, but they don't. All Visa is doing is exploring a new market that might help them grow beyond their current range.

Another powerful anti crypto weapon Visa has available are lower fees and better service. Right now they don't need to go that far due to their dominance as financial institution, but when you force them to go that far, they will. What has crypto to offer when Visa offers instant settlements and very low fees? Crypto is an answer to how shitty financial institutions are, what answer is crypto when they do exactly what you want?

Long term speaking I agree with you, but short term speaking, hodlers have not been much of a help preaching the importance of being a hodler during uncertain times. $6000 wasn't worth dumping at people said, and we all know what happened afterwards. It could apply to the current price as well, so I would be a bit more conservative when it comes to telling people to hodl since they mostly only care about the short term picture.

What people can do is have two stashes of coins; one purely for speculative purposes, and the other for long term hodling purposes. The ratios are up to people themselves, but in my case as risk averse pussy, it's 90% hodl stash and 10% trading/speculation stash. 100% Bitcoin. I do however use Bitmex to long/short certain altcoins do they offer a decent profit making opportunity.  

May I know what news you are referring to? Thus far every bit of positive news has been nullified by the effect of the bear market. The only good news event I can see affect the price is Bakkt launching or the SEC approving an ETF. The first is just a matter of time, the ETF will be something that will need years worth of maturing first. The SEC isn't going to allow Bitcoin to tap into a $4 trillion dollar market that easily.

The only certain event we have going for ourselves is the block halving next year. Technically speaking, a 100% increase is enough to undo the 50% lower block rewards for profitable miners, so don't expect a bull run to ignite any time soon. At current difficulty, a smaller miner called Mr Kristof said that the break-even point is around $3200, so imagine how much more of an advantage the larger farms have here. In other words, don't get too excited.

If it ever manages to launch, it will follow BTC-E that relaunched as WEX. Once your reputation has taken such a massive hit, your loyal market makers will not come back to you, regardless of how much advantages they enjoy on the platform itself. No market makers to guide an exchange start, no volume, and thus no liquidity.

The only thing these fools are doing is tarnish this space even further. Imagine how the mainstream media will react once the relaunched exchanges pulls off the same scam shit. Can we blame them in that case? Not at all. Centralized garbage exchanges shouldn't be given a second chance. If you do anyway, then don't be surprised about getting trashed everywhere on the net. 

Bitcoin's dominance will organically decrease depending on the site that's calculating the percentages.

If we look at CMC for example, it's not so much that altcoins haven gained on Bitcoin, but more so that the quantity of listed altcoins has increased. If you keep adding altcoins, which happens continuously, the dominance will eventually drop below 40% or even below 30%.

If you also add that altcoins are somewhat leveraged Bitcoin products due to their similar but exaggerated movements, there isn't much that you can do here. Bitcoin is very long term bullish, so based on that, even the most rubbish coins will gain value throughout the years. Welcome in the world of crypto.

The worst part is that you can't even short 99% of the altcoins. Up is the direction.

No one is surprised about this anymore. The way they took almost 700-800 million USDT out of circulation in quite a short period of time was very suspicious. They probably had to take them out of circulation to have the total number of USDT be closer to what they actually hold in their reserves (whatever their reserves consisted of at that time).

It still surprises me that we haven't seen regulators actively try to raid the crap out of TetherTO. They're either patiently waiting for their moment to strike, or it's not of much importance to them.

It won't necessarily have an impact on crypto as a whole, but what will play a role is how the Euro keeps getting weaker and weaker. In my case that's a bad thing because my Euros buy me less Bitcoin. €1 was +$1.20 like a year ago, and now it has fallen to $1.13ish levels. I do expect a flat $1 valuation in the forthcoming years. It's shit.

Just wait for Deutsche Bank to go down, it will drag the whole European Union down with it. It's a ticking time bomb.

I'm not sure what the extent is of how businesses are allowed to do 'foolish' things with user funds, but you have a point here.

The thing however is that a licensed business is less likely to do foolish things with user funds than a non licensed business. Coinbase, while I'm not particularly a fan of it, hasn't gone through an exchange level hack where coins were lost, hasn't an insane amount of its holdings sitting in hot wallets, knows how to securely generate key pairs, etc.

In the end, it's people's fault for letting centralized services use them as a punching bag. If you don't like it, quit using it.

Exposure = offering people the ability to use Bitcoin as money, doesn't matter how it happens. Without merchants doing this, the pool of merchants accepting Bitcoin directly will be so insignificant, that you'll burst out laughing hard.

Even the businesses dealing with Bitcoin only have to convert a chunk of their coins to fiat. Fiat pays the bills, Bitcoin does not.

Payment processors don't dump their coins instantly. They short a percentage of whatever they hold in BTC to retain their $$ value, then slowly unload the rest for fiat to not affect the price too much.

The industries that I mentioned work with very tight margins. The local super market here makes less than 5% per sale, because there is no way to squeeze out more due to the competition. If you try to do so, people switch to another super market offering the same product for a lower price.

That would be ideal, but then again, how do you think these suppliers will try to hedge the risks associated with Bitcoin?