That what you consider manipulation is nothing more than people with deeper pockets than you opening and closing positions. If there was more liquidity available the movements wouldn't be as severe.

This market is literally a joke with how institutions can't be bothered to wire tens or even hundreds of millions to an exchange that doesn't know how to take care of that much capital.

I expect the situation to only improve when legacy institutions start their own spot trading platforms, because the exchanges as they are right now are incompetent and shady in most cases.

Don't underestimate short term investors. Most of them are pretty happy to sell 10-20% higher, which there have been several opportunities for in the last couple of months, and that's just buy low sell high.

If you also take into consideration the traders who sell 1-5% higher, you'll realize that they are doing a much better job than those who are firmly hodling, which I am part of as well, so there are always two sides to a story.

Overall, the smartest money wins, and right now it plays out in the favor of those who take advantage of the short term ups and downs most people here are sick and tired of by now.

I'm not that confident in a good outcome either. Maduro has been signalling that he doesn't like anything related to our crypto currencies, because more adoption here means less interest in his own little toy.

I just hope for the people there that they aren't being punished for using that ATM, because it honestly wouldn't surprise me with how Maduro doesn't give a damn about those who aren't cheering for him....

If you aren't cheering for him, even if you're completely neutral and not necessarily against him, he will make you wish you was. I'm glad that his coin hasn't been listed on an exchange yet.

I don't see how Bitcoin or crypto in general can ever be undervalued. Most of the demand comes from people speculating about the price to increase, and when they exit the market, the demand exits as well.

In other words, Bitcoin goes down and will be valued to a point where there is enough demand to keep its price above certain levels. People have to accept the cycles we're going through.

People buying in right now hoping for a quick recovery to the $20,000 mark are delusional. Bitcoin currently looks cheap based on its 2017 high, but you can discard that high because of the hype madness we don't have right now....

Most of the swings or breakouts (whatever you like to call them) have been pretty easy to time with TA, which surprised me because it shows that TA actually matters and you can open up a position in advance.

The only thing you have no control over, is what side it will break out, and this is the part where you have to look at the past and traditional markets to see what the odds on average are, and you open up a position based on that.

I guess that with more and more algorithmic trading activity in this market, TA will become more of a guide than ever before, so those who say that TA sucks will likely be on the wrong side.

That makes sense with how their immense growth was solely the result of shitting on local laws. It surprises me that there haven't been more countries following Japan's example to get rid of them....

Overall, I don't think Binance will attempt to offer fiat trading within the US. It's too much of a risk and they definitely don't need to expose themselves to so much risk considering how insignificant the potential benefits are.

Binance is a money making machine already, and more so when ICOs no longer use Ethereum to launch their project on, but Binance itself with how that's the easiest way to get yourself a listing there.

It's good to see someone defend whales rather than accusing them of manipulating the price downwards to buy in cheaper. There is no shortage of whales are manipulators fools in here....

Most of the people don't provide buy support to an exchange, whales do. The average buyer places an order at market price and have it filled near instantly in most cases.

Whales provide buy support to protect what they hold in Bitcoin, which means that they protect your value as well. It's hard to think of entities who aren't down from +$6000 to where we are right now in terms of USD portfolio value.

I have seen that too, but it's pure nonsense. Every drop last year was linked to a certain event, which just shows that people don't know what's going on. They are going with the flow of what's trending on social media.

We also had a lot of people blaming the social media ad bans for the price to go down, while that was pure nonsense as well. I'm glad that people more or less understand now that it is just the speculative bubble that popped.

As for the good news to make the price go up, don't wait for it. I don't see anything other than an ETF approval be good enough news to initiate a pump, but we have to wait a couple of years for that....

And there we have another claim of manipulation, but again, without anything to back it up. Mind explaining why you think that people with more money than you 'easily' manipulate Bitcoin?

Owning a lot of Bitcoins as whale doesn't necessarily grant you an advantage here. It does motivate you to contribute to the market in order to protect and maintain value, but manipulation certainly isn't part of that.

To add, with so many different large exchanges, you as whale have even less power to move the overall market, because there is always someone else with deeper pockets than you and with different plans.

Everyone should invest based on research and understanding of the fundamentals, and not based on what you believe Bitcoin is or will be. The believe you refer to is what made people lose tons of money with shitcoins and ICOs.

The very reason you consider having only Bitcoin in the market to be boring, and that you want altcoins to pump, proves that you haven't done any research, nor have basic understanding of why crypto exists in the first place.

Get rich quick mentality is what it comes down to, what else do you need here, right?  

I'm sure that there is a small percentage of people there with enough capital to park a chunk of it in gold or Bitcoin, but what can you do with it when you run out of funds at one point?

What people there need is the US dollar, which is easier to buy into, and easier to utilize in case you need it, because it's possible to spend it almost everywhere. Stability is a key element, and that's what the US dollar offers.

With Bitcoin you don't know what its value is going to be tomorrow or next year. People assume it will go up, and it likely will, but what if it doesn't? It's too much of a risk since there are no certainties here.

Easier said than done. Smaller exchanges list all the shitcoins larger exchanges don't want to list, so there is always an incentive for people to keep using smaller exchanges, shady or not.

If you also add that larger exchanges will more and more subject their users to KYC/AML requirements, people will have even more incentive to use smaller exchanges, because they don't ask for personal information.

History tells us that after so many hacks and inside jobs, people here will keep making the same mistakes over and over again. It's greed that rules here, which we have to accept unfortunately....

At least OP isn't in the US where everything you end up doing turns out to be a taxable event. What shocked me the most is that even spending Bitcoin is a taxable event, which in my case is exempt from taxation.

On the other hand, I am subject to a 0.5-1% annual wealth taxation, which is straight theft, so I am better off getting rid of as much on-paper wealth as possible before we enter a new fiscal year

Overall, there is no legal platform yet that allows you to trade Bitcoin versus stocks. I wouldn't even recommend anyone to use a platform currently offering such services, because regulators will definitely jump in at one point.

No coiners be like: 'I knew Bitcoin is being used by criminals'.

If you look at the total on-chain transaction volume measured in USD in the last 24 hours, these dark net volumes (accurate or not) are nothing but peanuts. It's over $3 billion versus a few million....

Another example of how insignificant criminal activity actually is within the Bitcoin ecosystem. I'm pretty sure that Monero has taken a lot of criminal use away from Bitcoin, which is what it is better served for.

In other words, Ripple's XRP token has the same characteristics of a stock that follows the performance of the main company. I'm sure that the SEC isn't blind and will do whatever it takes to categorize it accordingly.

I must admit that I haven't seen such a dedicated, yet pathetic coin/token community before. They pop up everywhere shilling XRP in every possible way. Must suck to be a bag holder....

The funny thing is that Litecoin generates more volume than XRP, and it has been like that for years. Another example of how useless market caps are. It all comes down to their insane circulating token supply.

That's how things go unfortunately. It's the same with cloud mining, where so many members here warn newbies about the risks and how it's NOT profitable, yet they invest in cloud mining anyway.

People need to get burned before they understand that cloud mining is wrong, some times even more than once. I'm glad that the amount of YouTubers shilling coins or platforms has decreased significantly last year.

The bear market made a lot of them delete their content and leave YouTube. I remember having read an article last year where the SEC would do more to combat them, which I very much welcome.

I would definitely wait like a couple of months, maybe longer, to actually give it a go. Most people haven't heard of it yet, so let the risk takers--non caring people go first and see if they go through problems or not.

I still believe that for utter shitcoins Coinomi is the best reputable mobile wallet client available, especially with all the features they offer and how fast they add more coins on a regular basis.

Coinomi has served me well with shitforks throughout 2017 and 2018, and I'm happily looking forward to the next wave during a bull run. By that time it could be worth my time to claim them as their current value definitely isn't motivating.

The main problem I see here is that the authorities might end up seizing assets, either because the exchange has been fraudulent in one way or another, or the fact that it isn't registered as exchange.

I am sure that most people expect such a shady exchange to participate in fraudulent activity, so it's going to be interesting to see where this goes. After BTCe went down I haven't had any interest in using similar exchanges anymore.

I get it that people don't want to walk themselves through KYC/AML verification requirements, but playing Russian roulette with your funds on exchanges such as Cryptopia isn't a good thing either....

LedgerX has little mass appeal, while Bakkt has so much more to offer, and at the same time is planning to build further on Bitcoin to expand that what governments don't want to see gain ground.

I don't think that many of you guys take it serious enough. The US doesn't want to pump your bags, it wants more cash settled products to have big money buy into that instead of the asset itself.

There definitely is a degree of truth in that, but still, this doesn't change much to what I said above. I am open to be proven wrong, but that only happens when the CFTC ends up approving Bakkt.

They can always choose to launch their own crypto currencies that are backed by something to make it have some form of a base value. Venezuela did it already, and I'm sure more will follow in the coming years.

I actually hope they avoid Bitcoin. The less government involvement the better it is for everyone. Bitcoin could be sucked into a war that it has nothing to do with, all because a certain country owns dozens of billions worth of it.

We have never seen any government actually attempt to attack Bitcoin, and I prefer to have everything stay like that. I rather see them stick to gold and other means of preserving value over longer periods of time.