I like it because it allows me to buy cryptos at a cheaper price. The main reason it has gone down is because of the tether controversy. I think this is good, because many illegitimate businesses and coins are going out of business, such as bitconnect. Now tether has a subpoena. So the illegitimate businesses are being driven off, which is good for the market. Of course these instances will cause the market to go down but eventually it will go back up. So I wouldn't worry about these illegitimate businesses downing the market. It's just a part of the process. It is your job to research cryptos thoroughly to decide which are good and legitimate and which are frauds.

Yes, you are right. South Korea has no plans to ban cryptocurrency trading. What it wants to do is crack down on fraudulent ICOs and illegal exchanges. The main exchanges like Bithumb will not be affected, even though many people including the mainstream media believe that it will be. South Korea is taking the right steps in my opinion to protect unsuspecting consumers. South Koreans are too into crypto for the government to ban it. The people wouldn't allow it. Unlike China, South Korea is not a communist country. It's more loose. The people have more power. Cryptos will not go away there, though temporarily, through regulation, there may be downtimes at times.

Yes, mining or proof-of-work is slowly fading out. The new trend is now proof of stake (POS) which uses a few master nodes. Proof of stake is much more environment friendly and consumes much less electricity than proof of work. So many new coins that are coming out are now using proof of stake instead of proof of work. Some coins are a hybrid and use proof of stake and proof of work, which is still better. However, many coins are still mineable, so it isn't going away anytime soon. But I believe the trend is going to be less direct proof of work and either a different method or a hybrid.

I don't necessarily think it's that Mark doesn't like cryptocurrencies. I just think there's a lot of scams and fraudulent ICOs that he doesn't want that on his site. Just recently, many people got scammed with BitConnect and there have been many other fradulent businesses. Therefore, I could see why he wouldn't want that on his site. To me, it makes sense. Imagine users on the site clicking on an ad and giving money to one of these scams. Then when facebook actually does implement a legitimate cryptocurrency, people who were scammed would be so turned off by it. So I could see why he would take this approach. The cryptocurrency world right now is like a needle in a haystack. There are many illegitimate coins out there and a few jewels. Picking out the jewels is not that easy. Therefore, to protect consumers and to keep the reputation of cryptocurrencies intact, it makes sense to do what facebook is doing. This is just my opinion.

It may be because South Korea banned anonymous trading. Traders can no longer trade without a real name account that is linked to a bank. Not all banks are compliant yet, so many people in South Korea can't trade currently. But they will join banks that are compliant and volume will come back to the market soon. South Korea and Japan make up huge volumes of cryptocurrency trades, so they affect the market greatly. The good news is the volume will surely be back. South Korea is just trying to crack down on tax evasion and black market spending.

Of course, there is real-world use. XRP is one currency that has great real-world use. XRP solves the problem of cross-border payments. Today banks have to keep things such as nostro accounts overseas in order to have money already in the country it is doing business in. XRP eradicates this, because the speed of its transaction is so fast. So banks can do away with nostro and vostro accounts and just use the XRP digital currency. This saves a lot of money, because the money sitting in the nostro accounts are subject to price fluctuations due to inflation. XRP allows banks to use XRP and convert to any country's fiat within seconds, saving itself from inflationary costs. So, yes, there are real-world applications for cryptocurrency and especially for blockchain.

The WinkleVoss twins. When they won their lawsuit against facebook, they received millions of dollars and poured practically all of it into bitcoin. They are (or were) bitcoin billionaires but since the price went down, that may not be the case anymore. But they own a lot bitcoin. They are very passionate overall about cryptocurrencies and created the site, gemini, which I use often.

I think privacy coins can be big in the future. I think a great privacy coin that has a great community is DeepOnion. It has all the latest advanced tech, runs on the TOR network, and has a solid dev team. It currently has a very low market cap of under 40M. Do your own research. This is not financial advice, but I believe it's a solid coin that has a great future.

I don't think this will have any real impact. And the reason bitcoin fell today  was probably more due to the investigation into tether and bitfinex. Also, South Korea (a huge part of trading volume) banned anonymous trading today. So that probably had a big effect too.

Not sure why. I think it's because people sell to tether (USDT) often in exchanges. Without tether being there, a fear of it going away, they feel less confident trading, which can decrease bitcoin trading. Long term, though, I don't think this will be a problem for bitcoin.

In the United States, the IRS (tax agency) has been investigating crypto taxes for a while now. They had a court battle with the largest crypto exchange in the US, coinbase. They had a partial victory in which coinbase had to hand over the identification information of all users who traded over $20,000 or more, so they can pay taxes. So, yes, people will pay taxes on bitcoin. The tax agencies are already on it in the United States and in many other countries. Today, South Korea banned anonymous trading to enforce tax payments. Customers in South Korea must now have a real name account and be linked to a bank in order to trade crypto. This cracks down on tax evasion.

The best way to avoid paying the most tax is to hold the crypto for over a year. If you hold for less than a year, this is qualified as a short-term swing or day trade. This qualifies for around a 40% tax rate (or something along those lines). If you hold for greater than a year, this is a long-term investment and is taxed at 10-15%, which is much lower. So my advice is, hold cryptos for over a year to avoid paying the greatest amount of taxes.