I haven't seen gold as a safe haven, ever. It's an asset that's based on speculation mostly with how +80% of its daily volumes are derivatives people trade. If people really cared about gold they would buy and hold it physically.

Yes, it has been around for thousands of years where people used it as money, but that still doesn't mean it has to go up in value continuously, especially with how the supply isn't limited at all.

People tend to refer to gold as deflationary currency, but that's not the case.... another thing is that gold doesn't lose its utility, which means that the gold coins or items of thousands of years ago can be put back in circulation today by melting them.

It's funny how the sentiment against the US economy has picked up while under the hood, the riskiest assets (which stocks fit into as well) are performing exceptionally well, and they have been performing well for years straight.

What needs to happen for me to finally start acknowledging that a recession is near, is to see capital being withdrawn from risk-on assets. As long as that isn't the case, don't bet against the economy because you'll get burned hard.

It's hard to stay motivated for the people behind projects when they have dumped most or even all their coins. It's not an excuse to neglect the project, but without incentive there isn't going to be much productivity at all.

That's the reason I rather see the founders and developers own a decent enough chunk of the coins in circulation to keep building, otherwise what's the point? I wouldn't be motivated myself if I had no serious stake to grow in value.

At the end of the day, no one forces people to invest in these projects.... it's their greed that makes them do so and nothing else. It's fine if you accept it being a gamble, but don't cry afterwards when things go downhill.

Lets be honest, we care about seeing working products with utility, but we like it much better when we can fill our pockets, even if the project doesn't deliver anything in the end.

It is not good news.... everything countries end up launching is solely meant to further enslave the people using it because governments have more control over their financial system than ever before.

Currently they control the financial system through regulations where financial institutions have to comply with every single law, but this burdensome form of control has many weaknesses that are being exploited left and right.

By having full control over the network directly, they can force through changes effective immediately, either for or against you (mostly against you). It feels good to have Bitcoin as alternative.... it's an escape from this tyranny.

How do you expect people to stay calm when they go all in on a trade? Even worse, some go all in with high leverage, so every move could mean they either make a lot of money, or lose everything they put into that trade.

The only way I can think of this leading to manipulation is to have whales wick the price up or down to liquidity people's positions, but that's not our problem.... they chose to enter extremely risky trades and have to face the consequences.

Current price action doesn't seem very bullish to me, so I expect this to drag on for a while as there are various formations that could be forming as we speak.... only a proper break up or down will highlight the correct one.

Some people think we broke out of a descending triangle, but it doesn't look to be so as that usually results in much higher volume generation, something we don't have right now.

We're still well above the $7.3k mark so that is still positive, but I have to admit to not be as confident anymore as I was some days ago.... glad I'm just hodling and not trading my gut feelings.

Just as laughable as the flood of news coverage we have seen this year about booming adoption in countries such as Venezuela.... it's the same bull narrative we keep reading about over and over again.

Are there people using Bitcoin and other crypto currency to some lower degree, it seems like that, but most definitely not in the order news outlets want to make you believe.

It's what everyone wants to read, but it has to be based on facts, not on assumptions and hopes. I prefer honest news coverage, even when it's not bullish.... no one here gains any benefit from fake news.

Speculation is apparently proof enough for these "researchers". I don't think anyone really cares nowadays because it's clear what their plan is, which is to discourage people from using and investing in Bitcoin.

Tether has always been an easy bug to squash, so expect much more of these conspiracy theories in the coming years, especially when Tether starts printing coins again, which I'm sure they will when the next hype takes off.

Kraken this year confirmed that each time Tether printed coins, they experienced an influx of fiat flowing into their exchange, which means that it aligns with healthy buy the dip or fomo stages of this market.

I don't think it will do much to Bitcoin at all, especially because of how they aren't too sure yet what they will do with mining and those running nodes. I expect something to change on that front pretty soon actually.

By making sure their own coin gets the most exposure, it makes sense to wipe every other competing currency off the table, which they definitely are capable of.... their recent openness to the blockchain industry doesn't change anything.

He is a self-proclaimed billionaire, hence the reason people follow him.... the reality however is that he only has a couple million left in the bank, very likely obtained from the people he scammed by promoting scam ICOs.

What I find worse than some noobs following him as if he is some sort of a guru, are the influencers within crypto like Pompliano who keep offering McAfee a platform to speak and increase his following.... it's time for this nonsense to stop.

Yup. We have seen that happen in 2017 where transaction fees peaked over $50 which is not normal at all. It was the first time I actually got annoyed by Bitcoin and realized how important a healthy scaling roadmap is.

Would we be subjected to the same hype, the fees probably won't be as high as $50 per transaction due to SegWit, but certainly in the $10-$20 range, which is still not acceptable.

Miners are the lucky ones in the aforementioned scenario, users not so much. The miners couldn't care less how high the fees shoot up because it's money flowing right into their pockets.

It's called progress, progress that should have been accompanied by a scaling roadmap. Currently the transactions are fairly low because there is not much hype in the market, but that will change eventually.

I do however have to say that Ethereum suffers from the same problem where from time to time transaction fees shoot up.... it isn't all that long ago when there were more than 170k unconfirmed transactions in the mempools.

At the end of the day, you can always have fast transactions if you're willing to pay up for it. If you're not willing to pay up for it you have to accept that you have to wait for a couple of hours in some cases.

The problem with exchanges faking volumes is that they very likely have very low actual coin reserves, which means that whenever someone withdraws a decent chunk of coins, chances are that you can't withdraw at all.

What these exchanges do is block your account and ask you to submit all sorts of documents they keep rejecting until they have enough to allow you to withdraw your funds. It's one big shitshow that people shouldn't bother with.

Exactly. I'm not necessarily against businesses launching their asset backed crypto, but the way it gets advertised as crypto's new hope or the next big thing is false and actually very shady as it is meant to mislead noobs.

Yes, some stablecoins do extremely well, especially USDT, but that's just from the perspective of a trader, while most non traders will rightfully never touch that stablecoin because it's against anything crypto in general stands for.

I'm pretty sure they will, but it will come down to what form they will go ahead with. I don't think Facebook has any interest in rushing their stablecoin for a launch as that will only work against them as we have seen.

I never liked the fact that you are so subjected to what regulators allow or not allow you to do, hence the reason I'm a big supporter Bitcoin and any decentralized network where we can do whatever we want without permission.

Overall, do people here really care much if Libra never gets to launch? I don't think they do, especially with how most people have a similar thinking about the importance of decentralization.

Most buyers aren't really interested in the fundamentals even though it's very important to focus on if you're long term minded. It's just the repetitive nature of this market's cycles that interests buyers.

Hashrate follows price, so as long as we see the price go up, the hashrate will go up too even though there could be a few month delay. Similarly, the hashrate will drop when the price drops because it's no longer profitable to mine.

We saw that happen in 2018 where the hashrate almost halved at one point because the price kept falling consistently for nearly a whole year. It shocked a lot of people because they didn't believe $6k would break.

I agree, especially with how Ethereum is transitioning to POS which will allow people to generate passive income, which isn't something you can do with XRP, neither do I believe that XRP will be adopted by financial institutions.

Ethereum has much more liquidity too, which means that it's much easier to cash our or enter for large players, which can't really be said about XRP.... its market cap is very deceiving.

Another thing is that Ripple the company has been selling a lot of its XRP reserves, which as we can see didn't bode well for the price.... they singlehandedly made sure that it went lower and lower due to the constant selling pressure.

I'm sure that we'll see mr Schiff eventually launch his own gold backed crypto coin, which he will shill into oblivion.... he is so pathetic that I don't see any point for people to debate with him ever again.

I have seen two debates between Schiff and Pompliano, and in both debates there was no point conceded by Schiff, which just points out that he is only out to trash talk Bitcoin as gold bug.... this dude deserves to be ignored.

Schiff agrees to debate Pompliano to increase his following on social media, while Pompliano seriously believes that he can get Schiff to become more accepting of Bitcoin.

In this case you should be happy that you have no ID to give them, especially when you find out later that the people behind the bounty campaign sold people's information.

In current time and day completely verified profiles are worth hundreds of dollars each, so you can imagine how lucrative it is for bounty campaigns to sell your profile to whatever party that will abuse your personal information.

Bingo! It's only a matter of time before people stop hopping from exchange to exchange but go for more solid ones even though they aren't too comfortable walking themselves through KYC verification.

One way or another, people want to trade and be able to actually cash out their profits to fiat, which you need an exchange such as Coinbase Pro for. It's all fine trading on Binance and so on, but you can't cash out to dollars.

I very much doubt that Binance's US arm will do well.... if people are going through KYC verification they rather do it on an exchange as Coinbase Pro than Binance which hasn't been too positive with everything that happened this year.