I consider localbitcoins as a kind of arbitrage opportunity that supplements my trading and even allows me some ways to interact with real peeps - including some ability to pull some cash out - or at least have some actual cash sitting on the sidelines.

Is there something else that works better?  

Surely, if Localbitcoins seems to be serving as a vehicle for certain excessive risks, then there could be a consideration to discontinue with it completely or maybe to change the advert terms and perhaps lessen some of the exposure?



I don't know if it is feasible to screen out folks based on "multiple 100% positive feedback" because a large number of my interactions are with newbies - and once I do one exchange with them, I invite them to engage in direct transactions, as long as they seem cool.. at least on the buying BTC from me angle.  I still remain a bit hesitant to give folks cash, if there could be ways for them to reverse the transaction on the blockchain, so going through local bitcoins seems safer from that angle, for me.

Yeah.. of course he is.   Let's not get caught up in technicalities, please. 

I will concede that I may not know enough about the actual technicals or even the hypothetical incentives; however, hashing power in bitcoin has also gone up 10x in the past year or so, so 1/10th of that is where bitcoin was at a bit over a year ago.

Regarding directing mining towards malicious intentions or profitable intentions, I just cannot see a large portion directly focusing their mining on malicious intentions - sure there are some that will, but those kinds of attacks, even 51% attacks will not be profitable because the recognition of the network and the value is more than just the mining power.. like I already suggested.... segwit2x itself by definition is already a 51% attack - and if it achieves 90% or so following from the miners, then it is a 90% attack, and bye go your merry way with your hashing power, but I doubt that such divergence is going to be long lived because even if migration of 90% of bitcoin's hashing goes to another coin, there is likely going to remain a whole hell of a lot more incentive to stay on the main chain, because I doubt that many economic players are easily going to play around with such renegade divergences... even if some of them have said that they would.... the segwit2x plan still seems to not have the necessary technical competence to inspire confidence.. at least at this point.....

He is not a private figure, and his launching of a product to "compete" against bitcoin was a purposeful choice of his to become more public, even if he would prefer to be more private.

In other words, his health and appearance have become fair game topics.  I don't agree with purposefully denigrating him for how he looks because he cannot help how he looks, however, the fact is that he does not have a "normal" look, and even the level of his skinniness makes him look very unhealthy.  Maybe some testosterone treatment could help, or at least some kind of active treatment involving natural remedies of eating meat, exercise and proper sleep.

That is a fucked up situation, Elwar.

Based on the price, it sounds like the situation was either early 2016 or perhaps another time with similar prices.

I recall another time that I got screwed out of coins is when I guy kept pushing a greater and greater price, and I stopped at a certain point, so I only lost a couple of coins when he reversed the venmo transaction.. so I did not use venmo anymore after that.

By the way, my phone hack situation was a team as well, and it occurred in early 2017 when prices were bouncing around in the $1200 territory and this team was dealing with me and my accounts from multiple locations. 

Once a team force ports your phone and then gets access to an email or two, then they can use find my iphone to shut down your phone and other apple devices, and I got lucky that I did not back up my shit on icloud and my main computer was not registered in apple's find my computer.. or whatever it is called...  because it took me a while to get access to my apple account after my phone got bricked, and after they got into that Icloud account and took it over.

We can tell all the stories that we like, yet these various fraudsters are going to come up with more and more ingenious and creative ways to get into our bitcoin accounts and/or trick us out of our bitcoins.

Right now on local bitcoins, I do pretty decent screening of buyers or sellers - however, I still feel a little uncomfortable from time to time, when I am anticipating meeting someone.  I also limit my sales amounts, yet I see how they might gain your trust and confidence by slowly ramping up the amount of trades and sometimes it is not easy to distinguish between good guys and not so good guys when they might have a systematic approach in planning to rob you or some other devious ploy.

I don't know if there is any exact solution, Elwar.    Losing 85 bitcoins in one shot is a pretty big deal, and I have suffered some similar losses - but mine was through forced phone porting and simultaneously gaining access to two of my main e-mail accounts.  

Localbitcoins, is a tougher deal in terms of dealing directly with the public and also possibly gaining some exposure because these folks learn that you have coins and also might learn too much about your personal details and your possible bitcoin hodlings, and gosh we likely have to take additional precautions regarding how much we expose ourselves and our coins.. and even if it might be inconvenient to NOT store too many coins in such a way such as on local bitcoins or some of the wallets that we might use in our trading?  

There are attempts at plausible deniability, too, with some wallets, which maybe relates to how we store our coins, but these various devices and systems are still evolving, and if we want security, we have to learn how to employ these mechanisms in ways that maybe even makes it difficult for ourselves to get easy access to some aspects of our BTC stash.

In late August / early September, there were a couple of weeks in which I removed my localbtc advert because people were acting too crazy, and I was also feeling vulnerable in various regards because of how many coins I had in certain wallets and exchanges, including coins I had on local bitcoins and on my blockchain.info wallet.. and a lot of this additional vulnerability came from what seemed to be a sustained price increase that largely took us from the lower $1k prices to approaching $5k.. and then the small number of coins that I had in some locations, started to look like a lot of money.

So, keeping only a couple of coins in each location could be a partial solution, but it might not prevent nor discourage a more serious and determined attacker with guns and spotlights.. so what to do, what to do,?  and maybe even lessening local bitcoin's profile could be a solution, because even if you can increase your bitcoin holdings every year by trading at a premium, it might not be worth the risk to trade so much on local bitcoins, unless extensive precautions are taken?  

I certainly do not have a complete grasp on my various vulnerabilities and there are a couple of places that I likely maintain too many coins, a couple of exchanges, which could cause some problems on various levels whether it is just third party risk or if it is a kind of forced extortion risk (which is probably not a great likelihood, but it becomes a bit of a bigger likelihood when more bad people learn about bitcoin - and we have heard that some people kill over stealing an iphone, so if they can get a hold of 1 bitcoin, they might engage in worse actions to extort... and at what point are we safe?  And what are good measures to take? 

These are likely ongoing questions that we need to figure out including figuring out successorship issues too.. because it would be sad to accumulate a lot of coins, and then no one in the family gets access to them because they cannot figure out holding amounts nor passwords nor other security measures.. OMG.   

Something seems wrong with your math.  Let's just assume that 90% of the mining power does switch to mining segwit2x coin, then the next question becomes what will be the extent to which other economic nodes will follow them, and maybe it is an empirical problem that has to be witnessed (and experienced in order to be believed).  

Let's say bitcoin has 10% of the mining and segwit2x has 90% of the mining, then bitocin will operate with 10% of it's former mining power, but that does not mean that the 90% are controlling what bitcoin does (as in a 51% attack), then 10% of miners would then mine bitcoin and get whatever rewards and fees - and if segwit2x is able to sustain 90% (which I really doubt that they are going to get), then there becomes two coins, and segwit2x would have more hashing power under such a scenario, if it were to play out in such a hypothetical manner that you are describing.  

I personally believe that bitcoin could survive with 10% of its current mining power, anyhow, and surely if it is continuing to get spamming attacks and all of that, then safegaurds will need to be taken regarding that, but it would not necessarily be the death of bitcoin to have a competitor with more mining power (which again really seems doubtful to play out and sustain 90% or more because it is likely that a considerable amount of economic (and networking) value is going to remain with the original bitcoin rather than the new bitcoin in which they miners supposedly are going to migrate over to... Profitable for miners?  Perhaps, but still seemingly doubtful in such a hypothetical conjecture.

I am pretty sure that you are correct on both counts, that the ATH is measured based on Bitstamp prices, which current ATH would be $4,980 (or maybe $4,979.90 or some variation of such), and I think that he has been using the UTC clock, too.

Seems like a newbie coming into this thread and making nonsensical assertions that bitcoin is broken and putting forth some kinds of misleading analogies....  yeah..bitcoin is broken because of its governance... and that is why prices are about to break ATHs? go figure?

Sure it is nice to see some gaining on the bitcoin side of the ledger in this overall crypto marketcap space; however, BTC's gaining is not any kind of meaningful measurement of the value of bitcoin, when we have certain kinds of dilution through forkenings and even some artificial pumpenings of the appearance of competitive market caps by some of the alts that restrict their supplies and engage in other shenanigan measures to increase their coinmarketcap.com showings.

Furthermore, Ripple, really?

Anyhow, nice to see bitcoin gaining in spite of some of the bullshit shenanigans - on the other hand, even if bitcoin were to become 30% or less of the space, under certain circumstances, it's relative market cap remains only part of the formula - and perhaps there is some value to have some folks putting money into distractions and likely inferior products that may well provide them some short term gains or even longer term gains if they can identify and invest in a foundationally strong "competitive" crypto product, rather than a smoke and mirrors product...

He would do a little martial arts on you, and you would not be laughing, then ... 

That is  bullshit.

Surely you can trade in the way that you describe; however, on the other hand, you can create a system and follow the system and tweak the system to ensure that it is profitable.

One of the best systems is to buy as the price goes down and to sell as the price goes up.  The trick is to figure out your increments in order to be profitable and not to gamble with your strategy and if you do gamble to only use a small amount of your total proceeds for gambling plays.


Edit: My criticism of your post relates to your seeming suggestion that there is a kind of "real trader," and implications that trading strategies are limited. 

On the other hand, I do agree with any point that you make that if you don't know what you are doing, and if you get too greedy, gamble too much or bet in only one direction, then you can lose a lot of your stash in a short period of time, especially if you engage in leverage trading (aka margin trading).

Further, like pearlmen says above, a decent strategy for anyone who does not know is to practice and to learn with relatively small amounts of money.  Of course the more bullish you are about bitcoin, then the more you will engage in a BTC accumulation strategy, and the less bullish you are about it, then you will try to use it to accumulate more cash - and either strategy can work - and so sometimes going through the trading process will cause you to tweak a bit here or there because your bearish/bullish sentiments change with the passage of time, market momentum and events (news). 

Finally, a point that I am attempting to make, here, is that if you set up your strategy to extract value in either price  direction, then you don't even have to be correct about predicting the market or even attempt to engage in any kind of meaningful prediction of the BTC price direction - even though you might set your trading strategy up in such a way that you are more profitable from one BTC price direction (the one you are predicting) as compared with the opposite BTC price direction (the direction that you are predicting not to happen).
 

Surely there is considerable loss of confidence, and part of that has to do with how this started in the first place - the seizure of several of their assets.  It is quite laudable for them to come back from that kind of situation and to attempt to open back up and to create a system that attempts to make whole their users.  Surely they had an opportunity to exit scam on a big level, and conspiracy assertions that they trying to further scam people do not add up. 

The lower their trade volume and the more that customers exit their system (and I concede that it seems that a lot of customers have abandoned), the longer that it is going to take for them to pay back 1:1 of the outstanding tokens.  You are expecting way too fucking much if you think that they can just come back and pay everyone, when they created a system that will allow them to track the losses and to accomplish such payback in the future, which they have already said that they will do.

Sure there is likely some fake volume and manipulation, but that goes on with any exchange and there is more likely for such manipulation with lower volume and with a variety of tokens and surely they could manipulate to such an extent that they are able to buy back tokens at the relatively low prices of .4-ish, and then reimburse folks 1 - which ends up being an immediate .6 profit... Certainly, as a business they should be taking advantage of such situations to the extent that they are able to; however, their taking advantage of such situations and loss of confidence, does not indicate that they are purposefully causing such loss of confidence in order to deflate the value of their tokens (because in essence such would be a double edged sword, and they need to be able to balance such practices, if they would be in a place for such negative manipulation).

Anyhow, part of my point is that there is no need to overly read malevolence coming from BTC-e, even when there is a lot of that kind of bullshit conspiracy talk out there, and I am sure that they are continuing to struggle, and as you say time will tell whether they are able to make the exchange sufficiently "successful" again, in spite of what appears to be considerable ongoing loss of confidence.  I have decent confidence that they will win back a sufficient following and increase their business and pay back old customers, and all of this takes time.  A monkey wrench in this whole thing could be if the USA Govt is able to again disrupt their business or if they were to have some unfortune of a severe security breach. 

Like you said, time will tell, time will tell.

Yeah..  BTC-e is doing a real great job, given how heavily they were attacked.. and things seem to be going pretty well.  Of course, they gotta try to get back some trade volume that is maybe 1/4 of what it should be, but given the circumstances, they may be able to build that trade volume back up, if they can stay away from the USA govt from seizing any of their assets, again.

we have a decent two year bull run so far, from October 2015 - from $250-ish.   Is it really possible to get 1 or more additional years out of this particular bull run.. .Perhaps?  That would be a long bull run, if it were to happen... I have my doubts... I do agree that we are not done with the current bullrun, and another 6 months is reasonable.. I cannot really see going beyond 6 months more, unless perhaps there are several significant corrections along the way without blowing off too much steam, and then perhaps we would be going to the $30k to $50k territory in the next 12 to 18 months... that would be a lot, though... so I find it to be quite the stretch and maybe less than 15% chance of such.  But what do I know, except making up numbers?   

These are not really great excuses for your failure and refusal to communicate clearly on a public forum, and then blame me because I am asking for clarification, specifics and elaboration.

Think about your comment that you say things only for those who understand (or are at your level) comes off as quite pretentious and even presumptive that you are either smarter than other people or that your unique perspective is special.

The fact of the matter is that each of us has perspectives, and sure some people are smarter than others, but I would not necessarily conclude that I am smarter than someone else based on a manner of communicating or knowing certain secret things, and likely a sign of social and communicative intelligence is actually begging able to explain points that you make.  You are the one that made the points regarding the supposed dependency relationship of bitcoin to the alt coin market, not me, and I was just criticizing your point or alternatively attempting to obtain some clarification through my criticism of such point(s).




You seem to be getting caught up on semantics, here, and maybe at some point both of us loses whatever the fuck the earlier points were.

I think in recent times, I have been becoming more and more critical of others who go down the path of conflating various cryptos and acting as if bitcoin just happens to be one of the many crypto options.  It is a form of either failing and/or refusing to recognize distinguishing aspects of bitcoin or purposefully framing false equivalencies in order to either denigrate bitcoin or to pump alt coin trashes by acting like they are nearly the same thing.. blah blah blah.

By the way, I have no problem with the concept of being pro-crypto or even being excited about the many possible contributions of a variety of alt coin projects and ICOs... so long as we can recognize some of the scam marketing going on with a lot of them, too.  If we try to act as if they are all legit and not motivated by perverted marketing, then likely we are either perpetuating myths, living in a fantasy or possibly purposefully scheming.




Out of your own imagination, you are trying to describe some kind of pattern that likely does not exist and is largely based on a figment of your imagination - perhaps even with a fallacy of trying to put too much emphasis in predicting the future on some kind of self-selected past pattern that you believe to exist - again a kind of false equivalency in suggesting that there is some kind of rule that alts must pump at the same time as bitcoin or some variation of that nonsense that is no rule at all, but only something that you are hoping will happen without any real evidence to support it... and even if you end up being correct and it happens, it does not mean that it was either inevitable or that you predicted it properly...   but yeah, guys like you who fail to speak in specifics, seem to always be able to later proclaim that whatever nonsense you were predicting ended up being correct... 


Why does it matter?  Do you have some kind of inferiority complex that you need to describe yourself as some kind of insightful deity?

Are you trying to sell a consultation service or something?

Yeah, great, we can sometimes see a trend or a pattern and we can place some of our additional money in the direction that we believe is more likely to occur... great.. nothing wrong with that. 

Hopefully, you realize that in the end, these are a bunch of probable outcomes, and maybe you were able to predict a more likely outcome, and once the outcome takes place, it becomes 100% - however, nothing is 100% when it is in the prediction mode, and each of us come to differing conclusions regarding what kind of probability we assign to a specific outcome and maybe even how comfortable we are in concluding a certain outcome, whether it is assigning 60% to 70% or some narrower or broader range depending on our confidence level and the extent to which we feel that we understand a large number (or not) of the material factors that goes into making such a prediction about a future event.   


Sure it is possible that you could be correct, maybe a 30% chance or something like that, or maybe I am wrong and there is a 70% chance that you are correct; however, I would not put all of my eggs in a basket that is predicting something based on historical events and also circumstances that have changed too, and have you actually accounted for important and material factors in making you prediction?


I see no reason for that.  Sometimes if there is progress being made, then perhaps some kind of direct private discussion or chat could be useful - otherwise I don't see the point.

I made my points and you made your points, and my points seem better than yours... hahahhahahaa


Yes.. I see you are not really able to back up your various conclusions, and I am not even sure if it matters that much, except the fact that you are speaking in conclusory nonsense and trying to identify a pattern that likely does not exist and has perhaps a 30% or so chance of playing out.


Of course, simplifying markets and human behavior is not rocket science.   You can say whatever the fuck you want and you can predict whatever the fuck you want, but does not mean that you know what you are talking about merely because you assert your conclusions without giving any kind of meaningful basis regarding how you got there besides your amorphous and wishful thinking about sensing a pattern that altcoins and bitcoin pumps together.



Well, that is one of the things that happens when you communicate in amorphous conclusions.  There are some people who might agree with your various premises and conclusions and others who will not.


I don't mind sticking with the public thread.  I don't see any point to chatting privately about this particular topic.

You are coming off as a bit of a pretentious prick, in your attempt to assert that you have some kind of deeper understanding of the importance of alts - without citing any authority but merely referring to supposed authority and making vague amorphous statements about seeming inadequacies of bitcoin to provide certain use cases.

No matter the case, we can make our investment choices, and you seem to be a bit out of place here, in this thread, if you want to uptalk the importance of alts (and their supposed contribution the the crypto space).  Largely and generally, alts are copying bitcoin, and trying to find various use cases to distinguish themselves from bitcoin.  Sure some of the uses of these alt coins are going to get absorbed into bitcoin - whether you refer to the vague authority of some nonspecific reddit thread or otherwise (is that r/btc, by the way?)....

Anyhow, none of us are the complete knowledge of any of these crypto-space dynamics and there is a whole hell-of-a lot going on in the space - so I am not claiming to be some kind of deity regarding which alt cryptos are going to possibly be more useful than others, and I really don't give too much of a ratt's ass about them.  Right now, the main player on the block remains bitcoin, and likely we are experiencing some realization from the crypto community regarding that reality..... .so all of this does not conclude that there are not some decent and wonderful cryptospace developments that are not pump and dumps, and surely there are - but I would suggest most of us keep our eyes on the prize, which remains bitcoin, and do not get too distracted by the multitude of bullshit alts that you are amorphously trying to claim some kind of importance.. and amorphously claiming BTC to be in adequate in order that you can perpetuate your nonsense and seemingly pro altcoin thesis.

If I misunderstand the jist of your post, then maybe you could clarify such supposed misunderstanding?


I am suggesting that you are giving way too much fucking weight to the importance of alts, yet I do not claim to know the exact percentage of importance  - of alts, except for making the claim that you are giving too much weight to them in your suggestion that somehow bitcoin is dependent on the performance of alts in order to perform well.  Sure, I will give it to you that there is a symbiotic relationship going on that likely feeds both ways - but suggesting some kind of whiny hope that bitcoin folks better hope that alts perform well, otherwise the performance of bitcoin will be mediocre.. blah blah blah.. ... again... bitcoin is the dog, here.. not the tail...

Now, if I got this wrong, then please clarify.

Regarding my trading practice or abilities, I am doing just fine.  Thanks for asking.  Sure, my overall portfolio does better if BTC prices go up (that is why I invest in bitcoin and accumulate bitcoin), yet on the other hand, my portfolio also profits from volatility (and I presume that there is going to be a certain amount of volatility). 

Even though sometimes, I may make some short term BTC price predictions, my BTC trading strategy is barely altered by any of my anticipations and I largely just keep the same strategy no matter what the price direction.  In that regard, the totality would have been doing wonderful with BTC prices at $1k; however, currently we got about 3.8x greater prices, so my BTC portfolio is doing about 3.8x above wonderful and a lot of icing on the cake and a lot of margin for BTC prices to go down, if they end up going down.  In any event, I do watch some of the alts, from time to time, but believe that largely I do not really need to know a whole hell-of-a-lot about alts in order to keep up with my current trading practice and remain profitable and even flippantly reject your seemingly tail wagging the dog crypto hypothesis.     

Well, whatever is the proper term, we do not need a bunch of these ICOs that are claiming to be able to do something better than bitcoin.. whether it is a sidechain or some other technical way in which a lot of the various proposed functionality (to the extent that they are valuable within bitcoin and blockchain) will likely become part of bitcoin or some kind of related bitcoin appendage.

Don't be ridiculous.  A 20% to 50% fall in various alts (or even in the alt market overall) is not necessarily going to have any real dampening effect on bitcoin.   In other words there does not have to be a direct correlation (nor causation) for bitcoin to appreciate 50% or 100% in the coming weeks.

You are trying to act as if the tail wags the dog, and dogs just don't work like that (and neither do tails).