One solution is to lobby governments to decentralise electricity.

Lots of governments are sympathetic to the idea because they know how vulnerable their centralised grids are to hackers. But it costs money to decentralise, so they'll only do it if the voters are agitating for it.

In my experience (having been in the cryptocurrency space since 2013), when an exchange raises it's withdrawal fees, it does so to deter people from withdrawals. Why are they doing this? Usually because they've lost coins.

We saw this with Cryptsy, Vircurex and many others. They didn't tell people they lost coins, they just raised withdrawal fees to try to deter withdrawals and hoped to make up the losses through trading fees.

So my advice here is that this is a red flag, take your coins out and use an exchange with lower wit5hdrawal fees.

The thing is betting your entire wad makes you feel good, especially if it comes off. You feel like the king of the world.

But eventually you will lose and lose the lot.

Risk management has two elements: 1) only bet 1/10th of your stash at a time 2) don't get greedy and take profits. In particular make sure you manage to withdraw your initial stake, so you are then only betting with your winnings.

They're not anymore, though.

On Kraken for example, you can trade most alts against dollars or euros. It's no longer the case that you had to convert an alt into bitcoin before you could convert it into fiat.

If an alt does manage to build an ecosystem around it, and also has the ability to be converted directly to fiat, you might start to see divergence.

IMO it's the lack of distinct ecosystems that is holding back alts.

No. The assumption behind crypto is that electricity will always be there and the internet will always be there.

The internet is pretty robust in that it's designed to work even if some nodes are down. You would have to take down the entire world's internet cables to stop it.

Electricity is more vulnerable. Most electric grids are centralised and can be hacked by hostile countries. And they usually need fuel to power them, so if a country runs out of access to coal or gas, then they're stuffed. Solar panels only work when the sun shines and wind turbines only work when the wind blows, and battery technology is still in it's infancy so power can't be stored.

I'd forgotten about the Petro!!!

Doesn't that illustrate that whether a currency gets adopted or not is down to TRUST?

If Venezuela had a competent government and they issued a cryptocurrency backed by oil - which they have vast quantities of - the Petro would have taken off. It failed because people didn't trust Maduro.

But people trust dollars. So that's what they've spontaneously adopted.

Yes.

And that makes me feel that the push for "cashless" societies is really dangerous. Fiat needs to exist, and it needs to exist in cash form just as a backup in case there was an emergency.

Emergencies can occur in wealthy countries too - like if a hostile nation attacked the electricity grid.

Yes. Maybe the crisis in Venezuela came too soon for bitcoin to benefit instead of the US dollar.

But this case study does mean one of the bitcoin myths bites the dust (that bitcoin will help the unbanked and the poor).

Some traders place automatic sell orders on the resistence lines.

If lots of traders are doing the same strategy, then you'll see a lot of sells at the exact same time, which then forces market sell orders to eat into the buy wall, sending the price lower.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-11-05/venezuela-is-now-more-than-50-dollarized-study-finds


As Venezuela has become dollarized, inflation has come down. Even their idiot president Maduro admits the dollarization (which was done by citizens spontaneously ignoring their govt's ban on dollars) is a good thing.

A year ago, some of us were hoping that Venezuelans would have adopted bitcoin as their currency (or an alt). But the rolling electricity blackouts not only mean you can't use credit cards, but you can't use cryptocurrency. So they've gone with old fashioned US dollars in cash.

This whole real life case study shows that cryptocurrency won't get adopted in poor countries (because of lack of electricty). It will get adopted in rich countries - rich regulated countries.

Prior to China closing down all it's exchanges in early 2017, they did used to have a new year effect on bitcoin. But they no longer do as it's hard for them to buy coins. Most purchasing activity for bitcoin now occurs in the rest of the world.

The answer is No.

As we've seen with Libra - claiming a peg to fiat brings in the regulators connected with that fiat. They will want to see audits of reserves. And the Americans in particular hate people pretending that their coin is really the US dollar. really annoys them and they always move to shut such coins down.

I wouldn't be surprised if stablecoins disappeared in the next few years.

There is actually a lot of stuff going on in the Steem ecosystem, especially the creation of coins that sit on top of steem, which can be traded on steem-engine.com against steem.

To read more see the following:

https://steem-engine.com/?p=faq

They've also got d-tube, which is decentralised video posted on the steem blockchain. And a pretty big community, so it's one of the rare coins that is building an economy.

Is that still true? I don't think there are many people who believe in "going to the moon" any longer. They believe that bitcoin MIGHT go to £20,000, and there may be a lot of selling at that point. The last time that happened, the wave of selling pushed bitcoin down to $3,500.

I don't understand your reasoning. How would crypto reduce crime? People steal THINGS. Are you saying a smartphone bought with cryptocurrency is immune from being stolen but one bought with fiat isn't?

And what about violent crime? that's got nothing to do with currency, fiat or crypto at all, but to do with the aggression of certain people.

In other words it's made practically no difference, especially as the spread between buying and selling (bid-offer spread) is usually about 2% for most cryptocurrencies, especially the less liquid ones.

Lots of people simply don't know DEX's exist in the first place.

Quick! Name three DEX's people can use...

Well said. Bitcoin is just a token of exchange, it is completely neutral. It can only affect the world based on how PEOPLE use it.

If people decide to set up a crypto bank and start practicisng fractional reserve banking, guess what? The debt being created will look exactly the same as in the fiat banks.

You have to understand why Gemini was set up in the first place. The Winklevoss brothers bought bitcoin really early, and their initial idea as to set up an exchange traded fund with those bitcoins, and list it in the stock exchange so institutional investors could buy.

Their ETF idea was rejected by the SEC which gave them a long statement of reasons - chief among them was that it was difficult to set the price of bitcoin because most of the exchanges at the time were shady and opaque and manipulating both price and volume. In 2013 when they first tried for an ETF, 90% of the trading volume was Chinese on no-fee platforms, and it was clearly fake volume, which meant the prices were likely fake as well. And people were worried about Mt Gox, rightly as it turned out.

So the Winklevoss twins tried to address this by setting up their own regulated exchange. They spent millions getting a New York licence. They did everything by the book, complied with every single regulation that was in existence in the US. The thinking was that as regulations tightened, their exchange would gain in volume because they were already compliant, and at some point, the regulated exchanges would be the ones setting the price.

They're not there yet, and they have plans to open regulated exchanges in Europe:

https://bitcoinist.com/crypto-exchange-gemini-eyes-european-expansion/

But they are very much bent on doing this by the book - they want to be the dominant exchange in all regulated areas because they believe that regulation is going to spread. And at that point they'll open their ETF.

Binance by contrast takes a wild west attitude to things - but who knows how long they'll last?

The fluctuations would need to be similar to that of fiat currencies trading against each other. So no more than 10% in a given year, and on a month-to-month basis, about 2% to 5%.

Anything more than that and people can incur unacceptable losses. The people who accepted bitcoin for services in Jan 2018 and didn't immediately change it to fiat would have lost 50% within six months. No business can sustain losing revenue like that.

This is why I think alts like Doge might be the answer. They don't move much in dollar terms (they fluctuate between $0.0002 and $0.00025)