At that point it actually made sense for people to be skeptical about something that hasn't had the time to prove itself. The panic that has been going through the market during corrections must have been frightening.

People currently think that Bitcoin could become worthless overnight, which is ridiculous, but at that point it wasn't that far away from becoming reality, so I definitely understand the fear within that time frame.

I occasionally browse through old speculation threads where people were going nuts on each other during crashes. Some made fun of others who bought the top of a rally (still below $10) that we right now can only dream of.

Speculation on this forum is still the same after all the years, the only difference is the price.

Mind explaining what 'true' adoption looks like? The only form of adoption I have seen is how people consider crypto to be a money making machine, and that won't change--more than likely will become worse.

+90% of the people are here to make money, that's the hard reality. None of the exchanges feel the need to make people aware of why crypto has value in the first place. They only want to stimulate you to buy shit you don't need.

Exchanges are the entry points for people. If it goes wrong there, it's likely to go wrong everywhere.

It's actually not that strange, because it might very well lead to a split backed by miners and above. Ethereum has various levels it needs consensus on, which means that all parties have to agree to everything in order to not split.

I would say that the odds are like 50% that we see some form of a split. I'm sure that the majority will stand behind the developers representing the current Ethereum, but free money is tempting enough to have it go through anyway.

We'll see how it goes, but Ethereum needs to pump harder to compensate for the loss in block rewards and lower the odds of a chain split even further.

That would at least offer a bit more transparency, but I'm sure they aren't interested in that with their current core business being more than profitable already. Waking up sleeping dogs mostly doesn't end well....

Most people enter crypto through Coinbase and leave their funds there, or send it straight to Binance or other exchanges. They probably don't even know what private keys are, so it was an experiment doomed to fail.

Those who do know the importance of it probably don't care since they are more worried about missing out on trading opportunities. I'm afraid that people will keep cutting themselves open with how careless and ignorant they are.

Crime looks different from country to country, and the amounts concerned with crimes as well. I am sure that the crimes on corporate levels tell a whole different story if we were granted a look into the actual numbers.

Nothing in the world comes even remotely close to the fraudulent activities happening within the corporate world, but since the mainstream media is so focused on small scale criminality, it overshadows everything unfortunately.

By your logic, it would mean that the wealthiest countries would come out worse than countries with a weaker economy. There are always two sides to a story, because what you see and read about isn't always what is right.

I'm not sure if these tools giving 'investors' confidence is a good thing, especially with how most of them are so focused on these events that they ignore why Bitcoin has value in the first place.

2018 was the year of the ETF it almost looked like. People's main focus was that an ETF approval would initiate a bull run to miraculously turn their heavy bag into something that was worth more than what they paid for it.

It's a toxic environment that people created around themselves, and they have only themselves to blame for. Common sense was enough to understand that an ETF didn't stand a chance last year, still doesn't this year.

Makes me wonder, does he assume that they don't want to help him: because they aren't responding (yet), or have their told him that there isn't much that they can do. Too bad there is a language barrier here, and a lack of input from OPs side.

If it concerns a genuine minded exchange they will do whatever they can to refund OPs coins. I'm however afraid that there is a possibility for them to ignore everything and just hope that OP gives up on his coins. Horrible situation it is to be in.

It all depends on what side of the road you stand. If you thought to become rich in 2018, which applies to most people, then 2018 was a pretty destructive year for your "investment" in terms of its fiat value.

If you know how to play this market, mainly because of what you have gone through in the previous years, 2018 was an amazing year for you, because you had the opportunity to buy back your coins at way lower levels.

The good thing is that you can learn from what happened last year if you got burned, and use it in your advantage during and after the next bull run, because remember, the price always tanks after pumps of that magnitude.

We have had months of extremely low volatility in Bitcoin last year, and it didn't change anything or anyone's perspective on how we should use Bitcoin differently. People were sick and tired of it.

Governments and banks don't really care about Bitcoin being stable or not. Governments just want to tighten the ecosystem around Bitcoin with regulations, and banks want to sell you products based on Bitcoin.

The more volatility there is, the more likely it is that people will buy coins from whatever centralized entity and enter the market, because that's what got people interested in it in the first place.

Mind explaining what makes you think that we should dip under the $3000 mark before we can expect growth again? It's something I have been reading a lot in the last month or so.

The thing with the mass expecting something to play out usually means that we're due for an opposite movement, just like what happened before we fell below the $6000 mark while people were expecting a leg up.

I'm scooping up a few more coins just in case we head down further, because it's too damn tempting to buy while we're still below $4000 and that's what smart minds do. Expect the unexpected!

I don't think there is much appetite for something like one global currency. Governments like the idea of having their own currency they can shape the way they want, which isn't possible if they use Bitcoin.

Gold was somewhat of a global currency ages ago, but even at that point there were different forms of money locally. I am in favor of different forms of money because it gives you the option to choose the best one for you.

The great thing about crypto is that we have so many alternatives, that in case one goes down for whatever reason, we have another one ready. More power to the people.

I'm buying Bitcoin at current levels, and there are more smart minds doing the same, so it's even less worthless right now.

Everything has value as long as we believe it does--are willing to pay up for it--accept it as means of exchange. Bitcoin checks all boxes and the amount of people thinking the same keeps growing.

No coiners will always find a way to trash Bitcoin, and I don't expect it to change, not even when Bitcoin becomes super mainstream. There are still skeptics talking about gold like how people talk about Bitcoin.

Bitcoiners in the same way trash altcoins. It all comes down to whether or not it's valuable to the person directly. In case it isn't, it by default is painted off as useless, scam, and so forth....

I'm actually glad that people didn't respond to this, because that would be an absolute nightmare. If one person could get people to do this, it would show how much more stupid the majority is.

I would be shocked to find out that exchanges don't gamble with people's funds on the market. It's easy to access, and they have enough in their reserve to have the small minority that does cash out still cash out.

Banks haven't been doing anything else throughout their existence with people's funds, so why should crypto exchanges be different? Most of them are even more shady....

Volatility is a gift to the market at the current stage, not something that works against us. Stable prices at this stage do more harm than good, and we have seen that play out more than once already.

Volatility translates into volume and more interest. Stability translates into low volumes and less interest. People are here for a reason, and that reason is what will continue to attract people in the coming years.

Just browse through social media and this forum when there is no volatility--people get bored and focus on other things. Stability will come when use becomes the main reason for people to be here, which will take years.

There are two sides to the story though. I do agree that it's better to stick to that what generates decent volumes and has a listing on various large exchanges, but that could also mean that your buying opportunity is over.

Tokens tend to lose most of their value after them being listed on exchanges because people suddenly have multiple platforms that allow them to unload their bags because they bought in at the very early stage.

Investing in tokens is gambling because no one cares about their utility. The trick is to buy them when no one wants them, and sell when they gain some traction and get rich quick noobs think it's time to enter.

Correct. Bitcoin's main purpose is very simple, which is to function as digital gold and a payment network with LN making it faster and cheaper than anything else we know of right now.

Another thing is that they don't compete with each other for hashrate, which is quite important in my opinion. People here turn everything into a battle, which isn't how we should look at the difference coins.

At the end of the day, we aim to have something that provides us censorship resistant money, and I can definitely see there being enough demand for a decentralized utility platform as well.

Maybe that he doesn't want to use a centralized party to do something he doesn't need anyone for? I'm happy to see that someone is willing to take care of his own business instead of using external parties.

BitPay is not a good service. They use a different payment format that isn't supported by all wallets, plus they force people paying for goods to include an additional fee, which is retarded. People should avoid BitPay at all cost.

I haven't seen that, could you point me to an example where a fiat currency crashed and Bitcoin actually went up as result of that? If you refer to what's happening in Venezuela and Turkey, then I have to disagree.

The volumes there are so low, that there is no way they can even remotely affect the price in any shape or form. People assume it affects Bitcoin because news outlets make it seem like that, but it's not true.

News outlets have been spreading nonsense around Bitcoin adoption in various countries while there isn't much happening on that front at all. Most people have no way to verify what news outlets publish so they believe it.

It's definitely related to there not being many use cases yet, because EOS has much more capacity in its current form than Ethereum but it isn't helping at all to stimulate quality usage.

I like Bitcoin for how simple it is. It's doing one thing, but does it exceptionally well, while the rest is struggling to figure out which of their hundreds of features is interesting and safe enough to use consistently.

I do however own some Ethereum though, bought around and below $100 just to anticipate on the fork and decrease in block rewards, and it seems to be a very good decision so far.

People initially didn't care much about Bakkt, but that changed the lower the price was. Suddenly people referred to Bakkt as something that could lift the price back up, which is quite an interesting shift.

As for wall street, most financial institutions have likely been doing the same thing for years here. Some people think they are in before wall street, but that's not entirely true.

They are busy building the tools and platforms for the rest to enter as well, and eventually they will. Institutions want to shake out those who may contribute to selling pressure on the way up, so it helps that the price tanked hard.