I didn't. It takes a lot to tempt me to sell any of my cold wallet coins, and by the time the price went up to such extreme levels, I really believed this is unhealthy, and from there I started to cash out small portions.

I started around $10,000 because that's what I considered an important psychological barrier. Then kept selling smaller portions all the way to $17,000 and from there stopped selling because I too started to believe that we could go way higher, and the fact that I didn't do myself a favor selling and seeing the price continue to rise.

What started to feel bad back in december of 2017, started to feel good in 2018 because it finally started to pay off.

These things can't ignite a bull run, but do further fuel an already bubbling market. The more good news there is during a bull run, the more effect it will have because of how the mass thinks. It's action reaction. If whatever company accepts Bitcoin, the price pumps, people assume that's the reason it pumps and buy in.

It goes both ways though, people blame BCash for the massive decline while it wasn't, but the price was tanking while these con artists threw mud back and forth, so the mass assumes that this was the main reason the price has gone down. If it really was, we would have gone back up again, but the we didn't, and that's what the mass ignores.

TA would have told people that around that time a massive move was due, and it happened, just not upwards. 

The SEC will say yes eventually, but the 'child' needs to grow and become mature enough to enter a world where the big boys stack their billions.

Every rejection/delay means a better understanding of what the SEC wants, and thus a major step forwards. People assume rejections/delays are bad, but it's actually the opposite, because if you know what they are looking for, and actively work to take away their doubts, you're closer to an approval than before.

People see the SEC as an evil entity, but it's not. They have a $4 trillion market to protect. Bitcoin is nothing. Why would they allow it to enter that market to begin with? They don't need a Bitcoin ETF, it's people here that want them to approve an ETF hoping that the price will pump hard.

Because Bitcoin is the only one with full blocks and network congestion. Ethereum some times too, but that was more the case back in the days where Crypto Kitties single handedly crippled that platform. The rest of the crypto coins enjoy low fees consistently due to the lack of use. In other words, it's no surprise this is the first time you heard about it, and no surprise that you heard about it here on this forum section.

If there is less retail presence in the market (and thus less spontaneous buying/selling), which is the case right now, the algos control the market and TA is your best friend. I was dismissing TA as well, but no longer do so because it actually turns out to work to a larger degree.

We frequently see these attempts, but they remain exactly that, attempts. Bots thus far have nicely bought up or sold down potential structure breaks, and we have seen it happen today as well. People with tight stops are getting rekt when this happens, but that's their own fault. You should know that in a market lacking liquidity these things will happen, especially at current stage with how extremely thin the books are.

I wish it was that easy. It's really not. What most people don't realize is that while we may be done with a large chunk of the selling pressure from 2017/2018 buyers, we got another bunch of sellers to deal with who bought at current levels. They'll cash out at a variety of different levels, buy back in, then sell, especially when it comes to the algorithms, and this will continue till we've broken through every single resistance level.

In the end, even if the price goes up to $6000-$7000 from here in the next 12 months, that's a pretty sweet return if you bought at current levels. Don't see much point in waiting for the all time high to be broken. There is plenty of profit potential in the near to mid term, people just don't see it, or don't know how to utilize the opportunities that present themselves.

Same cycles, same reactions, the only thing different is the price, and that we're now actually enjoying some fundamental growth, which wasn't really the case in the previous years. Back in 2015 people had way more reason to freak out and speculate about the end than is the case right now. People calling themselves hodlers are exposed when the price tanks and they start complaining, which we've seen back in 2015 as well.

In the end, I don't focus on the peaks, I sell them. What matters is the price development from bottom to bottom, because bottoms here indicate the end of a massive speculative cycle, and thus a fair reflection of the price. Current price of $3500 isn't low. It's just about fair.

I tried Bisq, which is a decent DEX, but the volumes are pretty low and the spreads are too significant for daily use. I'm certain that it will continue to grow, but the rate of growth is very slow. It has a 24H volume of just over $100,000 where BTC/XMR accounts for almost 90% of that volume.

It's very easy to point at exchanges as Yobit or Hitbtc, but as long as they are solvent, and make enough profits, they will continue to operate. If they don't gamble with people's funds and lose them in the process, an exchange of Yobit's shitty level can last for many more years.

I'm more inclined to say that one of the weird Asian exchanges that popped up out of nothing and immediately generate hundreds of millions in volume are the first to exit this space.

I saw a thread on the fake Bitcoin side of Reddit where BTrash supporters were celebrating the downfal of BTC and how their shitcoin has way larger blocks to onboard the world. These idiots don't realize that even when you have 1TB blocks, if there is no usage to begin with, your block size is completely irrelevant. They can perfectly cap their blocks well under 300KB and still enjoy years worth of very low fees.

BSV is even worse, they can cap their blocks at 50KB and still have plenty of empty block space left to fill up with imaginary transactions. Just as imaginary as Crack the Scammer Wrong.

People have been warned over and over again not to allow whatever entity take care of the custody aspect, and they continue to ignore everything.

If something happens, people have only themselves to blame for, and at the end of the day, more coins getting hacked means less direct availability of coin supply. If Coinbase at one point loses all its keys, and thus the +800,000BTC they hold in custody, they have done an exceptional job making sure that a significant portion of the total supply is taken off the market for ever.

People hate banks, but trust crypto exchanges, lol. I have way more confidence in banks than vice versa.

What do you consider high fees? $0.05? $0.10? $0.20?

In most cases people only conduct one, perhaps two transactions per day. People tend to overexaggerate when it comes to fees just to save a penny or two in the process, and that while adding an extra few pennies significantly helps making sure that miners pick up your transaction and not someone else's with a slightly higher fee.

The highest fee I paid in 2018/2019 was $0.10 and that was just to incentivize miners to pick up my transaction and have it included in the next block. Saving like $10-$20 if you have to consolidate a shit ton of inputs, then ok, but when it comes to standard transactions it just isn't.

I don't think you understand what JPM 'coin' actually is, and what segment of the market it's meant to serve. In easy terms, this 'coin' will never end up being listed on any of our current or future crypto exchanges.

I'm pretty certain that there are plenty of banks already with their own token serving their clients, but as always, people hype up that what they read about, and currently that's the JPM 'coin'. Jamie Dimon must be having a good time seeing how much attention it has been generating on social media. It's basically free marketing, lol.

It's not going to compete with any of our existing crypto currencies, but more so with the tokens other banks run. Clients will be looking for a bank with the best and cheapest service, and they'll switch if they have to.

From a legal perspective, it's always better for businesses to know what the rules are, but there is no point in waiting for governments to catch up on what's happening within the crypto world. You have to take that risk, because there is plenty to gain here when you're the first. Binance for example didn't give a shit about regulations, and look where they are right now.

Coinbase because of how strict it is has to deal with so many limitations, that even their closest fiat competitors (e.g. Bitstamp, Kraken) are able to catch up as time goes by, and some times even surpass Coinbase's volumes.

May I know what your 'own' adoption calculation is based on?

I'm pretty certain that Bitcoin's adoption isn't even 0.5% of the world population, and then we can argue about what adoption actually is. Strictly speaking, looking at the number of addresses is a pretty solid metric on its own, but then again, there are also millions of users who never installed a wallet and just use an exchange as their all-in-one service.

In the end, fiat will always remain the dominant form of payment, I just can't see that change, especially with how they can just as easily benefit from the crypto revolution by tokenizing their own currencies. Bitcoin will always remain an alternative to fiat, not vice versa.

That's pretty understandable with so many TA charts floating through social media.

It's also impossible to read any crypto related news outlet without being subjected to some random hillbilly TA. I think the main problem isn't so much all these predictions, but the desperation of holding a bag full of expensive coins people want to see pump for once. For most people the crypto market is their first investment sort of experience, so they literally have no clue what's happening here.

In the end, if you're not here to trade, or use Bitcoin, or do whatever else with your time to earn Bitcoin, your stay in the crypto market is boring and a waste of time. There just isn't a way to put it differently.

They just act stupid. It's all done to fuel their anti Bitcoin narrative. These entities have all the funds, manpower, tools, etc, available to them to conduct research in the most effective possible way. It's just not in their interest to actually publish it. It's valuable information they utilize internally, because publishing it means free info for other financial institutions and entities looking to enter this space.

In the end, they know that the system they participate in consumes way more electricity than Bitcoin does, even if the Bitcoin network itself grows another few hundred %.

In case of JPM, we don't have to look at what they say (it's shit anyway), but look at what they do. Actions speak louder than words.

Not sure if no more shorting is a good sign.

If we look at Bitfinex's longs, it looks pretty scary to be honest, especially how easily one can initiate a massive long squeeze and who knows what happens after that.

It's either one or more entities are going to pump the crap out of Bitcoin very soon, and they are heavily long for that reason, or we'll see a strong counter move towards the South. Given the market sentiment, and the weird setup, I'm more inclined to think that we're due for a crash, but I have not enough balls to put my money where my mouth is in this case.

Bots can be programmed differently, and if you manage to gain even the slightest form of speed advantage by slightly tweaking the code, it's already worthwhile.

In the end, just like how professional traders do it, you mainly want to make sure that your servers (the ones that your bots operate on) are located as close as possible to the exchange's servers, which is where you can gain an extra speed advantage. If done well, HFT bots can easily execute 5 or more trades in the time it takes you to execute one single trade.

Binance had a massive upgrade last year, where if needed, they can potentially process over a million trades per second. Enough to utilize here for HFT bots.

Not sure if that's something to look forward to. It all comes down to the circumstances. Bitcoin being worth $1 million at one point in the future is shit if the US dollar only represents $100,000 (or even way less than that) in actual purchasing power.

I remember that people celebrated that Bitcoin against USDT made new local highs last year, while in reality it was nothinig more than the market pricing in the very weak USDT spot rate. In other words, you didn't gain or lose anything. It's just a market adjustment.

It's way cooler for Bitcoin to continue gaining value with a strong US dollar.

But..... But.... Mike Novogratz said that institutions could to lift the price to $8000 this year. In other words, we have waaay more to go down if he's still a counter indicator.

Or just sell and be done with the suffering because most people simply can't handle the stress that this market subjects them to. It's all cool when the price keeps going up, people's confidence in the market and Bitcoin grows, but as soon as we're heading South, things change. I can't even imagine the level of stress they have been going through last year, and perhaps even this year.

In most cases, the weakest hands are the first to dump during corrections, so if that's what they did last year, they did actually pretty well if you look at the price right now.