I should have added a bit more information, my bad.

It's my ultimate goal to accumulate as many coins as possible because I strongly believe that there will be wide level adoption in the forthcoming decades, and what's better than using the lack of adoption right now to increase my holdings wherever and whenever I can. I don't have much to lose anyway. I will not sell for $$, but spend, because that's the purpose of money.

Lightning adoption picking up makes me even more bullish. The network is in its infancy still, but you can already instantly settle transactions with thousands of merchants if you connect to a 'popular node'. This is what money should look like. Stability would help too, but it's way too early for that.

That's the community page of Bunq.

I know of people who successfully used their Bunq account in combination with Bitstamp in the more recent months. No issues here.

Don't be fooled by their friendly nature though, because it's a bank at the end of the day and they have to abide by all the regulations they are subject to. It's definitely more friendly than a regular bank, but more friendly doesn't mean you're free to go nuts, because they are forced to check your transaction activity, and report it to the authorities in case of shady/weird/inconsistent activity.

Violation of their terms will result in account closure, so read their terms carefully.

If there was, you can be sure of the fact that people would have shilled the crap out of it by now, but nope, nothing like that to be seen.

In the end, reviewing products makes more sense for people who have a certain following on social media, which means that the company behind the products knows that it's worthwhile paying a decent bit of money for some exposure. Considering that most people here don't fit into that category, the most they can expect are free trials, memberships, etc.

That's also not going to help much, especially if the bear market turns out to drag on all the way till 2020. If you're semi skeptical now already, you're going to lose it for sure in 2020.

In all cases, it's a waste of time to wait for anything to happen within crypto if you aren't either actively trading, offering services, working on your own project, or actually using Bitcoin. Most of the people waiting and hoping for the price to reach back to its all time high levels sit at home all day waiting for a miracle to happen. That shows what's wrong with this space. Too much hopium and hello can I finally get rich behavior.

An ETF is a big deal. The SEC is trying to protect its market, and rightfully so.

If a Bitcoin ETF is going to be approved, the SEC wants to be sure that it can prosecute the bad actors in case there is manipulation or whatever else of similar nature going on. It's a near $4 trillion market Bitcoin is about to tap into, so no wonder the SEC is trying to make sure every known scenario of manipulation and custody is taken care of.

It's known to most of us how shady Asian exchanges are when it comes to artificially inflating their volumes and whatnot. The SEC knows that too, and they are trying to figure out how to work around it effectively.

In order to figure out what people own, do, spend, the spammers don't need this spam attack to accomplish that. The average users are champion in exposing themselves already, so it would be an utter waste of time and money sending them dust and wait for them to spend that specific UTXO.

In most cases I can tell you right now which addresses are connected to a specific exchange or service (expecially when it concerns the most popular ones), so from there it makes these spam attacks look even more silly. It's just hyped up badly by news outlets. It's what they are designed to do in order to generate a few clicks left and right.

Definitely agree with more competition resulting in lower fees, but it comes down to transactional volumes in the end. Many hops make a pretty penny (pretty enough to continue running a node) after a month or so. I strongly believe that Lightning is capable of that with enough adoption.

That's a valid concern. These physical nodes indeed have a shelf life which I seem to have ignored. Thanks for pointing out.

That makes sense, but still, even with that in consideration, the fact that we see how more and more individuals are running a lightning node at this stage for geeky purposes (hundreds of physical nodes have been sold, and there is plenty of demand for more, but little to no supply to meet it), and later to earn a pretty penny by scooping up routing fees, we'll see the ratio between 'fake' nodes and legit ones become completely different.

People need an incentive to run a node at home, and Lightning provides that incentive, especially in form of these plug-n-play physical nodes.

For me it is the ultimate goal.

I don't see much point in making my Bitcoins work for me (mainly comes down to the risks associated with short term trading/lending/etc), and how exactly? I sold back in December 2017 and still have some funds left of the sales ready to buy back. Is that making my coins work for me in your book? If not, then what is?

It's not exactly easy to put your coins to work for the average person if you take into consideration that they don't know how to trade, and loans usually aren't that fruitful either with how much competition there is, and you expose yourself to counterparty risk.

Lightning is a purposeful utilization of your coins, but the average user here is more likely to lose them messing up than getting anything out of it at this stage.

Fidelity mined Bitcoin back in 2015, so it's way more likely that they were on board well before that. In other words, wall street is partly in already.

The very fact that they are setting up the infrastructure required to offer custody, trading desks, futures, etc, comes all down to them trying to make it more mainstream and have them earn tons of money in the process. They will outperform, perhaps even replace most of the current crypto exchanges in the future, and it's only a matter of time.

As far as the number of coins I believe wall street owns, I don't know and don't feel comfortable guessing. I can't back up saying they own 100,000BTC, and I can't back up saying they own at least 1,000,000BTC.

Lol. The only ones struggling to survive are those who expect 10x profits before the end of the week. The rest is pretty okay with how the situation is, because people get used to it and lower their expectations.

This bear market makes people realize that crypto isn't a one way ride to the moon, and that's very important, because it makes them understand that free money doesn't exist here. At one point profits will be taken by large players, and that's what we're seeing right now. If there was more liquidity, we wouldn't fall down that hard, but hey, there isn't more liquidity, so we have to deal with the situation as it is.

Instead of hoping for a bull run to happen, better enjoy the current price and stop calling it boring or low. $6000 was boring and low people said, well, $6000 is still better than $3500 isn't it? Be careful what you wish for.

Not everyone knows what to look for when verifying software, especially when people are rushing to claim whatever shitcoin airdrop. In the end, someone needs to be scammed, then another one, and then dozens of more people in order to have it become public enough to pop up on news outlets like this.

Richard Heart has been hardcore shilling his Bhex shitcoin and recommended people to use MetaMask, so I hope they don't end up falling for the fake one.

Fluctuations are pretty normal, especially with how the bear market made lots of 'enthusiasts', startups and services quit, and thus they take down their nodes.

https://bitnodes.earn.com/dashboard/?days=730

As you can see, there is steady/healthy growth. The size of the chain has grown significantly, but the number of nodes increased regardless of that. So no, there is no problem.

What bothers me more is that he is basically betting on a measure that will force people to layer 2, and that's something you don't do. Stimulating free use of the network is what we have always had, and that's exactly why Segwit adoption isn't picking up. I don't like that certain entities aren't upgrading, but on the other hand, that's the freedom they have, and we should respect that. Bitcoin is freedom at the end of the day.

Not much to disagree with here, but hey, it all comes down to the freedom aspect. People can choose whatever they think offers the most usefulness to them.

Right. It works well enough in its current state is more fitting I guess.

That cracked me up, lol.

It seems to be a scam indeed. What usually happens is that they ask you to submit all sorts of ridiculous pieces of information and high res scans of bank statemens and government issued documents, but continue to reject everything. They basically try to make it so difficult for you to get your funds back, that they want you to drop it and move on.

The difficult part here is that while you're absolutely right, legally there isn't much you can do yet against them, because they could very easily claim that they need more time to look into your case due to the lack of manpower.

It worked till where we are today, and the number of nodes continues to increase. That's not exactly a sign of there being a problem, or does it?

If you also add that with Lightning growing even more nodes will pop up, because whoever the operators are, there is a financial incentive to run a node now, so the number of nodes will continue to increase.

Average user incentives are buy in low and sell higher. They use light weight clients, or they don't use a client at all, but leave their coins on an exchange.

Don't break something that works extremely well today. We know that it works. Messing around with something so important is a gamble, and will likely drive people away from Bitcoin.

It doesn't take much of your time as scammer to release everything and wait for noobs to deposit. I'm pretty certain that if the scammer(s) behind this site end up stealing 1BTC, then it's already a worthwhile scam they pulled off. Shitty site + some shitty marketing = $100-$200 in resources and time perhaps? Seems like a solid ROI, especially if you have more scams running.

If you also take into consideration that plenty of people lost a lot of funds when BTC-E was taken down, people (the dumb ones of course) might even see this as an opportunity to recoup some of their losses. In the end, there is a reason they utilized this database.

He seems pretty vocal on Twitter, which actually worried me a bit, because it's beyond ridiculous to even suggest something like that where we are right now.

It's not as bad as it seems. If you're running a decent setup, the sync time is pretty reasonable actually. I set up a second node myself earlier this year, and it synced in like 11-12 hours, and that while I expected it to take a day at least. RPI's are a different story, but then again, run a decent setup and you don't have these problems.

In the end, the average person won't run a node even with a very small block size. Why? They just don't give a fuck. People who do give a fuck, and merchants, will continue to spec out their hardware to run their node in the most stable possible manner.

Luke Jr lost his mind.

I really do enjoy seeing how Gold bugs blindly try to shill their bags, which very much reminds me of what we see in the crypto space.

I once saw a discussion between a hardcore Gold fanatic and a journalist, where the fanatic pointed out how you can spend Gold in every store by first converting it to US dollars, and then spend the dollars, which makes zero sense. What it does is point out even more how useless Gold is as local currency for day to day transactions.

I can see some utility when it comes to large transactions settled with physical Gold, but that's about it.

What do the technicals indicate according to you?

Do you remember 2017? Techno kiddies called top at pretty much every level and they were wrong consistently till the price touched $20,000 on some exchanges.

What you are referring to is more irrational market sentiment. If the price drops 10% from where we are right now, people will believe we're up for way more blood, while if the price pumps with 10% from where we are right now, Bitcoin will rule the world and we'll see $20,000 before the end of the year. In both cases it's the exact same Bitcoin, same fundamentals, etc, but people just lose it.

The funniest thing here is that Bitmain and Roger combined can't control the price of their centralized garbage coin. Bitmain bought up so much of that shit that they are literally afraid to buy more, but on the other hand, they can't drop buy support for their coin either, because that would devalue the holdings of their +1 million coins, which is another problem.

It's hilarious, there is next to no depth in any of the BCash books, so what the miners there do is hoard all the way down, and sell their BTC to pay the bills. The more BTC they sell, the less there is to utilize and buy BCash.

I strongly believe that with how serious Roger was about BCash, that he converted a sweet chunk of his BTC holdings to BCash at +0.20BTC levels early on. It really would surprise me if turns out that this imbecile holds more than 10,000BTC today.