Agreed.

I do occasionally see people pop up here ask why there isn't anyone doing marketing for Bitcoin, but they purely assume this is needed because altcoins and ICO's do that to obtain visibility in this market. As you said, Bitcoin is good enough to have people like it without being subjected to any form of force or desperate advertisetments promising the world, but deliver poo in reality.

If you look at the number of transactions, and the on-chain value measured in dollars, and the number of daily active addresses, Bitcoin is by far the most used currency in the space. With enough local merchants accepting Bitcoin, it will provide some useful utility there as well.

Doubt it.

It's so easy to verify yourself locally and buy Bitcoin at very competitive rates (usually a 1%ish premium over spot) that the demand for these ATM's is probably on the lower side.

ATM's are very niche and the potential exposure is pretty low with how one really needs to have these ATM's be the only way to enter Bitcoin. In Europe this form of demand is negligible, but who knows, perhaps in the Philipines the situation is different and they do need these ATM's.

In the end, I'm happy with these ATM's because it means another fiat entry point. Perhaps that with more competition and volumes the fees significantly decrease, but still, don't see them go under 3% with how there are taxes you have to pay, and you're in to make profit too.

Going all in with my savings back in 2013 was definitely the deepest point of my time in crypto.

I couldn't stop thinking about all the possible things that could go wrong that would make me lose my savings. Almost every minute of the day I checked the price to see if I made some money or lost money, and this continued for like a week straight. I ended up panic selling at a ~15% loss, then went all in again after the price recovered, then again sold at a loss.

Going all in is bad in so many ways, but the losing aspect isn't even the worst part if you think about it, the stress and the bad mood that comes with it is so much worse.

Saving up a decent amount of money takes a good decade, getting rekt in crypto can be done within a year.

I read a few articles claiming that this exchange could dethrone Bitmex as the main derivative exchange, but when you look at everything that's starting up, it's either a Coinbase or Binance killer, Bitcoin killer, Ethereum killer, etc. It's not going to help anyone by hyping this shit up, especially with how it doesn't really offer much of an advantage over Bitmex itself.

You can't copy Bitmex's reputation within the market, their liquidity, etc. In order to attract people, Bitmex either needs to mess up big time, and you still have to offer a platform that isn't just slightly better than Bitmex, but way better than Bitmex, and that in every field.

You're cherry picking here, and very much in the wrong way.

But let's say on-chain dollar volume is not indicative of real use either. We still have another very useful on-chain metric indicative of use (regardless of the purpose), which are the on-chain transactions of the last 24 hours;

Bitcoin 324,000
Litecoin 25,452

Even Dogecoin with 28,309 transactions has more on-chain transaction activity than Litecoin, and that consistently for months straight.

At least, Litecoin is doing way better than BCash with only 8600 transactions in the last 24 hours, and that with way less merchant adoption.

It depends on where you are I guess, but for me spending Bitcoin offers a convenient way to avoid taxation in a legal manner (i.e. spending Bitcoin is not a taxable event), and what's better than buying goods from one of the main ecommerce sites? I'm certain that there are enough people out there willing to spend their coins like this instead of donating 20-30% of it to the government by cashing it out to fiat.

These people are part of a minority that has no economical mass, and probably never will have. On top of that, they have decentralized markets to utilize already.

PayPal has wide level adoption, and has an extreme bias towards buyers in terms of favoring them when things don't go the way they should with transactions. It opened the door for scammers to charge back on merchants and people as well, but merchants list PayPal as option anyway, because getting rid of it means less potential income.

I don't see any benefit in PayPal accepting Bitcoin. They are way better off launching PayPal token within their centralized environment and still allow people to charge back.

I think that new investors initially believed that buying dips was a good thing, but they have rekt themselves hard last year by doing so.

In the end, I don't believe that current prices are really that cheap, short term speaking. Looking at the price, and how we've been hovering between $3200 and $4000 for quite some time now, more people seem to consider this range to not offer an interesting enough discount. In fact, from what I have seen around me, and here on this forum, it really seems that people expect sub $3000 levels and save up their fiat for that.

I love these articles, it's no longer something that bothers me, but it actually delivers some much needed entertainment.

In the end, this clearly shows that these public faces with and without skin in the game, are exactly in the same position as we are, which means that no one here knows anything about what the market will be up to.

It's all based on who guesses right, and the fakeperts who do so will become gurus, and those who guessed wrong will be laughed at and memed for as long as Bitcoin exists.

It's marketing. People here seem to be so tied to their this or that doesn't work way of thinking.

Bitcoin as an additional payment option doesn't cost anything if it isn't being used, but will very likely result in a wave of customers they otherwise wouldn't have. BitPay alone did +$1 billion in conversions last year, where it's safe to say that the far majority of this is related to Bitcoin.

Give people the merchants they frequently shop at, and this $1 billion will become +$2 billion, and more as time goes by.

I like Charlie Lee, very down to earth and respective of that what adds more value to his own little toy functioning as Bitcoin test-bed.

The hardest part will be breaking the 2017 all time high, and from there you don't have any resistance levels to worry about, so in case there is a bull run in the making at that point, it will be pure madness. If you also add that we have more fiat entry points, and more capable exchanges, way more users and way more fiat should be able to enter without problems.

I dislike those who talk like an OG, but don't hold any coins themselves. These entities are only here for the fame. They haven't done anything for this space.

You guys focus too much on money. What's the point of selling anything when you see how your coins that had no value back in the days, became worth a few million, then hundreds of millions, and now billions, and soon he (assuming it's one entity) might become the world's richest and most powerful being in existence would Bitcoin become the world reserve currency.

On top of that, Satoshi owns all the shitforks too, so you can imagine how much economical mass he currently has. People worry about things they have no clue about. Focus on how to accumulate more Bitcoin, that's a way better allocation of your time.

Trading volumes are pure speculation. It's not indicative of actual use.

If you want to see the bigger picture, which does include speculation, but for sure also plenty of ecommerce and other sorts of value transfers, then you have to focus on the on-chain volume.

https://bitinfocharts.com/bitcoin/ $5.4 billion on-chain 24H activity.
https://bitinfocharts.com/litecoin/ $335 million on-chain 24H activity.

Trading volume to market cap ratios aren't much of a good measuring stick, see this;

https://bitinfocharts.com/ethereum/ $211 million on-chain 24H activity.

It's very weird for sure, but it seems actually the case.

https://support.coinbase.com/customer/portal/articles/2959952-paypal-faq

*Withdraw refers to a direct Fiat movement from a Fiat Wallet to an external source
*Sell refers to an indirect Fiat movement from a Crypto Wallet to Fiat then to an external source

People in the US, EU and the UK can't sell crypto to fiat and then withdraw through PayPal according to their faq. In other words, only fiat that didn't touch crypto can be withdrawn back to PayPal. Has not much to do with Coinbase, but more so PayPal's shitty terms.

It depends on what your targets are for this year. My personal target for 2019 is to settle above the main $5700-$5800 support, preferably firmly above the $6000 level. If that happens, I consider this to be a successful year. It's going to be a tough level to break through, and that while it kept us up for most of 2018, but it's not entirely impossible.

We have to forget about bull runs and focus on realistic growth, because that's much more reliable in the end. On top of that, the longer it takes for wild west speculation to start boiling up, the more time there is for Lightning to grow and serve users off-chain. If we can also welcome Schnorr signatures this year then that's even better.

In other words, boring year in terms of price action is an amazing year for Bitcoin fundamentally.

I have seen more people complain about the fees financial institutions charge, but most of them don't do anything to change it.

The most interesting aspect is that people legit believe that financial institutions implementing blockchain tech will help them reduce fees and speed up transactions, but that's not what will be happening. They will implement blockchain tech, but won't be granting their clients any of these advantages. In other words, you will continue with slow transactions and high fees. It's their core business model, how can they ever let go of that?

We pumped hard without mass adoption or fancy institutional grade instruments, and we'll be doing that again in the forthcoming years.

People always tend to point at events being the reason the price has tanked, but it's just another cycle. Of course, it's always easy talking after the price has gone down already, but the charts rhyme, and they'll keep rhyming until we actually start using this shit, and wild speculation isn't the main price driver anymore.

In the end, if you pay attention to the bottom development throughout all the years of Bitcoin's existence, which is what actually matters, you see massive growth, and that still at current levels after a +80% decline from 2017's high.

Even if we see green this month, we'll need a whole lot more of that green to wipe out the prior paper losses people have suffered after $6000 broke in the most brutal way.

I don't see any reason to be optimistic until we make higher highs and not continue with lower highs and eventually break out to the downside. I get it that people want this bear market to end, but it doesn't end because you want it to end, so don't expect anything until we see higher highs. The trend favors the bears and that needs to change.

In case we haven't found a bottom yet, it highly depends on whether or not we close below the 200 WMA. In case we do close below the 200 WMA, it's a clear indication that we're going through an entirely different bear market, and one that with a high probability will last a whole lot longer than many here might think.

On top of that, people seem to forget that we're dealing with so much algorithmic trading activity, that previous support levels will turn into resistance levels, and bots will respect these levels and sell whenever they can to secure profits, so whatever we end up doing, it might take years before we even see $20,000 again in the 'worst' case.

I'm happy with steady growth.

Binance's token is probably one of the very few ones that actually serves a purpose, plus they have the perfect formula to keep that coin relevant for plenty of more years. If they manage to challenge Coinbase in a manner that no other exchange ever managed to do yet, I'm pretty certain that BNB will pump even further.

If you add that BNB will be one of the main base currencies on their DEX, and you need BNB to pay for GAS, you always need BNB, regardless of what coin you trade.

CZ for president, lol. This dude knows how to create a successful business.