The thing with bear markets is that they are very deceiving when it comes to statistics of searches, mentions on social media, etc.

A lot of people rekkt themselves badly after buying in near peak levels, and now the shilling is over, and people are too embarrassed to even talk about crypto (because no one wants to say they bought the top or hold whatever shitcoin right now), statistics show declines that make it seem like there is no interest anymore, but these people aren't gone, but just silently hiding somewhere in a dark corner.

Once the price starts pumping for months straight, these people will find their way back to social media and start the shilling game again.

I'm pretty certain that Bitcoin's lack of short term scalability is more of a problem than that. It's just not interesting for them to accept it now, and I can't blame them for that. Amazon has such a massive reach world wide, that even a slight uptick in demand is enough to have the network become congested.

It all comes down to Lightning. It's just a matter of time before we see them hop on board after successfully having done some prior testing.

It's difficult to combat sellers who are either selling because they have to, regardless of the price, or ICO's who obtained their coins with a shitty infeasible idea that wouldn't ever work anyway. These entities (especially the ICO's) have no problems selling even at $2000 if they have/want to. People are rightfully cautious to go balls deep and buy up every satoshi at current levels with that in mind.

I do however have the impression that the market is exhausted and we're potentially up for a sweet bounce over $4000, and if it breaks the resistance around $4200 it would be the first bit of positiveness in a very long time.

Bitcoin has indeed a limited total supply, but there is an infinite supply of paper (contract) Bitcoin. Gold's spot volumes are so low compared to the paper volumes, that it in some cases represent a ratio of 1/100. In other words, for every dollar that has been used to trade spot Gold, there has been $100 dollars used to trade paper Gold.

Bitcoin will be heading in that exact same direction eventually. CME is catching up fast, and they are frequently generating more volume than Coinbase Pro itself.

I'm happy if Bitcoin settles between $100,000-$200,000 where we can use the relative stability to actually use it as currency. In the end, we won't look at Bitcoin being worth $100,000 anymore, but at the smaller nominations being worth either $1-$10-$100-$1000, etc.

As far as I understand PayPal's terms, they still haven't changed anything about their terms concerning crypto currencies.

I remember having stated it last year somewhere, but the way I believe it works, is that you can only withdraw funds to PayPal that haven't been utilized yet. In other words, if you wire $4000 to Coinbase, buy 1BTC at $3600, you can withdraw max $400 back to PayPal. If you sell your 1BTC, you won't be able to withdraw these funds to your PayPal account.

In case I'm wrong, anyone please correct me.

I looked at his first post (only has two posts at the time of writing), and it seems that he used a fake mixer called coinmixer dot es. It's sad that these things happen, but hey, the best way to learn is to lose money and from there improve. I hope it wasn't a lot, but still, it sucks regardless of the amount.

I always stick to one mixer, which used to be Bitmixer back in the days, and now ChipMixer. I might look like a shill considering my signature, but you'll like the experience there with the various chip sizes you can withdraw at any given time. Try with a small amount first, and see for yourself how it works.

Bitcoin's use will play an important role, and the simple fact that it's digital Gold is another benefit. Gold's industrial use is negligible. If it was valued based on that, it would lose over 90% of its value in an instant. The rest of Gold's demand is entirely speculative. Bitcoin is better in almost every aspect. No reason to think that there won't be any demand at a later point.

With Lightning there is an actual currency aspect people can utilize on a daily basis. If that picks up, there is basically nothing stopping it from growing for decades.

Not exactly sure what you mean by that, but merchants will adopt Lightning, because it's instant, and cuts out the +3% fees that flows straight in the pockets of greedy financial services such as MasterCard and Visa. Giving people 3% discounts on their purchases through Lightning will definitely attract a whole bunch of new customers, and generate even more revenue.

I don't really see the need for anything like that. I'm pretty certain that at one day, there will be a new transactional data format that requires way less block space, which means that the blockchain itself isn't growing as 'rapidly' as it was doing before the upgrade, and you can keep the smaller blocks without increasing them, which we will be forced to at one point if nothing changes.

In the very long term, most of the day to day activity will take place on the Lightning Network. I don't see much reason to switch back to the main chain for the average user by that point, which is the whole point of layer 2 at the end of the day.

I just added to my position around $3400 because the price looked like it was a worthy buy, and thus far it seems to be a good choice.

I'm pretty certain that most of them are heavily short still, so when the price does happen to tank to whatever sub $2000 level, they'll be making sweet money, which is why they don't care. It's pretty easy to not care much if you 1) have a decent hodl stash, and 2) have shorts open. In other words, you'll be gaining either way. Not a bad way of dealing with the current trend.

I'm pretty sure most people figured this out even without SEC commissioners thinking it could happen eventually. It's just a matter of logical thinking; they have certain requirements that must be met, and they will be met at one point in the future.

Every delay or rejection means that the entities trying to get an ETF approved know where to improve, and if the market within the US is generating more volumes, which Bakkt and Nasdaq will definitely help with, then the SEC basically doesn't have much left to reject it anymore.

I find it quite interesting how each time news outlets manage to find something to report about when it comes to ETF's. I have to credit them for their creativity and consistency.

You can't compare Bitcoin to Gold in terms of percentage gains. Bitcoin is an undeveloped asset, has no solid liquidity within any of its markets, and is largely still a speculative investment tool. Gold as developed asset has one of the most liquid markets in the world. A dump that can't move Gold even 0.1% will cripple Bitcoin's market with how there is no liquidity to eat through large sales.

Gold investors open to change will look for a good digital alternative, which is Bitcoin. Ethereum or any other altcoin doesn't fit in that category. I however do not believe that these investors will get rid of 50% of their holdings, that's too much. It would make more sense to have it be 5-10% and perhaps more at a later stage, but still, not nearly close to 50%.

Gold had thousands of years to gain trust and adoption, Bitcoin is the new kid on the block. Give it some time.

If ~$500 fluctuations aren't of interest to you, why are you very pleased that the price went up like ~$400 today?

You don't have to make yourself look tough. It's okay that you're afraid of what the market is subjecting you to. As soon as the price goes up, people gain confidence and start to think about how Bitcoin will take over, but as soon as it dumps, fear creeps in and you think about how you could have sold while the price was 10-20% higher a week ago.

One has to be a geek and true believer of the underlying tech to not give a damn about what's happening right now. The rest pays attention to the $$ value of their portfolio, which is all good considering that most people are here for the profits.

It's a breakout with pretty decent spot volumes, but it's way too soon to celebrate.

I do however like that CME has gone nuts with over 50,000BTC in volume today, which isn't something we see them do frequently. It's way more actual USD volume than the largest fiat exchange Coinbase Pro. CBOE as usual is far behind with ~3000BTC in volume, which is peanuts. Perhaps it's a better idea if CME ends up replacing the CBOE when it comes to getting an ETF approved.

Let's see how this increase will deal with the weekend. Weekends generally have lower volumes, less excitement, which in an already bearish market translates into lower prices.

It would be easier if you told what client you're actually using, because one client isn't the other, and do you run a full node or do you use a light client connected to a third party node?

I'm personally using the Bitcoin Lightning Wallet from anton kumaigorodski on Android. This client easily allows me to close the channel and have the funds be sent to whatever address I want. It's noob friendly with how every feature is easy to find and utilize. Good alternative in case you're testing out Lightning again.

In general, you go to your open channels, and from there you should be able to close them.

Stop using blockchain.com and switch to way better looking alternatives such as https://blockchair.com/

It has way more features, allows you to filter based on metrics such as block size, input/output, block value in $$, etc. I haven't opened blockchain.com this year at all, and there is nothing that I miss about it. People stick to that site because they are so used to it. Ditch it. It doesn't provide much usefulness anymore, and they still have plenty of bugs they don't seem to care about to solve.

Blockchair supports Litecoin, Ethereum and Dogecoin too.

This is just the beginning. At one point exchanges like Yobit and Hitbtc will follow, because every exchange that starts shady, mostly ends shady. It was like that when I entered this space with Cryptsy and then Mintpal, and today nothing has changed. As long as people continue to use these shitty exchanges, they will continue to get scammed.

Scammers are who they are, we can't change anything about that from behind our screens. We can however stop using their exchanges, and with that we make sure that they don't have anything, or at least, way less in case they run off.

These predictions might seem worthless to you, but in your same post, it shows exactly why these predictions are very useful.

It was indeed so that people were very bullish overall when the price was still hovering over the $6000 level, and if there is one thing that does work more than it doesn't, then it's shorting the mass's euphoria, and longing the mass's despair. I went with the mass and paid the price for it with a long, but that's part of the game at the end of the day.

People right now seem to be overly bearish, and we'll see if it pays off to long their bearish sentiment. I am currently long.

It is a scam by default if the terms don't indicate that when there is no longer fresh money flowing into the scheme, you'll lose your initial deposit. Considering that schemes in general aren't that transparent, neither are cloud mining services, they are scams all together. If they were transparent, their income would probably tank with +90% so they have all the incentive to deceive people with false promises.

History tells me that it doesn't end well for people investing in anything related to POS coins/tokens. In the long run, the price tanks and you are left holding an expensive bag of rubbish. 10 years worth of POS rewards won't be able to wipe out the losses you have suffered by holding this for one single year.

Same. I just read that they will also allow people to use Bitcoin to invest in stocks and ETF's, which seems to be a useful addition to their service.

https://www.abra.com/blog/abras-next-chapter/

The only thing I'm not sure about is how the SEC will react to this, because as far as I can see, nothing indicates that they have been granted a license/registration.

I will take every satoshi I own down with me in case something happens to me out of nothing. I just can't think of a way that I will ever be satisfied enough to arrange something like that. I'm just too paranoid. I have been through enough to understand that there isn't a way to trust anyone that's close to you.

If I however see it coming, and there is some time left, I will try to distribute my holdings in a way that I consider to be fair for the people around me, and I'll make sure that a significant chunk of it goes towards one or more competent cancer reasearch organizations. If they accept Bitcoin, great, if not, ill have it be converted to fiat, but by that time, I'm pretty certain Bitcoin has taken over pretty much everything already.