There's no such thing as real value. Value is entirely psychological phenomenon, it doesn't exist in nature independently from humans or some hypothetical other intelligent life forms. The number you see on Bitcoin exchanges is as real as the numbers that you see on stock markets, foreign currency exchanges, etc.

This is a subforum about Speculation where people are interested in short-term price, because they want to do some short term trading.

The fact that a simple short-term bearish opinion gets so heavily criticized here as some sort of apostasy against Bitcoin just means that this forum is not a good place for getting information about Bitcoin's price movements.

IMO we are approaching a very critical moment, if the $40k support will be broken, Bitcoin can start freefalling because it will be viewed as a sign that we're entering a bear market, so traders will rush to dump it while it's still high. I won't be surprised if Bitcoin will quickly go below $30k once the crash starts. But on the other hand if this support holds there's a good chance for recovery and a new rally. Basically, whomever guesses the trend right now can make a lot of money, because the risk is high.

When people say "Bitcoin hack" you should read it as "bitcoin wallet hack" and not "Bitcoin network hack". And you should take it very seriously, don't think that if the protocol is very secure, then nothing bad can happen to your coins. "Bitcoin is unhackable" can be just as easily misinterpreted by newbies and lead to bad results.

It's favorable for miners, not the whole market. All the hodlers have their wealth reduced, even if just temporarily. One dump can also trigger a bigger dump, for example if there's a lot of leveraged positions, or if speculators decide to trade based on momentum. And also such large dumps contribute to volatility, which hurts Bitcoin use as a currency. Would have been better if miners were selling their coins continuously.


When Bitcoin drops everyone here starts talking about FUD and manipulation, maybe those things are also good for Bitcoin?

I can't call Bitcoin a social movement when the social movement aspect is secondary to most people. In other social movements people are attending rallies, make petitions, contact legislators, have political candidates. In Bitcoin social movement we just have some guys with a few thousands twitter followers write how banks are outdated and Bitcoin is the future.


People are free to express their personal opinions, and you are free to challenge their opinions. We shouldn't be getting rid of anyone.

Crypto market will always be full of scams, it's easy to create a shitcoin, bribe some small unregulated exchange to list it and then hire shills to promote it. Or even skip step two and just sell it as a token on Ethereum blockchain. This is a lot like penny stocks but even more wild and unregulated. It should be a common knowledge to not trade small altcoins, but like with gambling, some people believe that they have luck and skill on their side. That until they lose their life savings on a stupid bet.

He's still a big blocker, I think he's even one of the first big blockers, so he will always be salty that the community rejected his naive vision in favor of more technically sound solution. And he makes such unrealistic assumptions like thinking that the block size won't change in 40 years or that no new solutions will be presented. When Satoshi created Bitcoin, he didn't imagine that someone would come up with Lightning Network, similarly in the future someone can come up with a new breakthrough that would dramatically increase Bitcoin's capacity. Gavin is like those people that said that machines heavier than air can not fly.

Do you really think that China is banning Bitcoin to spread "fuds" and crash the price? Like some top-rank officials from the Chinese government are manipulating the market like Bogdanoffs from Bizonacci's clips?


We don't know how different would the things be if China never made moves against Bitcoin. Maybe there's some parallel reality where China never banned Bitcoin and the price in Sep 2021 is $100,000. We have lived all this time with a priced-in fact that a large portion of global population and wealth is not able to legally participate in the Bitcoin market.

The US got light drugs like marijuana banned in the whole world just because they had a domestic campaign against them. If the US wanted, they could very easily convince dozens of countries to introduce anti-crypto bills tomorrow, it's a really no-brainer thing to do for most governments because in their eyes they would sacrifice nothing and win a favor from the US.

For now this Infrastructure Bill seems like a purely domestic thing, but if they will attack Bitcoin from anti-ransomware or anti-terrorism angle, they can easily turn it into a global chain of anti-Bitcoin legislation.

Wikipedia says that a social movement is a:


Do majority of Bitcoiners have a common social or political goal? I would say no, because I don't think all Bitcoiners are actively trying to make Bitcoin the dominant currency, most Bitcoiners are just holding it to reap profit. I don't see any discussions about plans how to make Bitcoin replace fiat currency, everyone is just saying "when Bitcoin will replace fiat and banks its price will be $4,000,000" as if it will magically happen on its own.

Basically go to some NFT marketplace and make a token that says "I pinky-promise to edit or delete this post that I made on bitcointalk on the first demand from the current owner of this NFT". Of course like with most NFTs, it has dubious if any legal power, it's not enforceable by algorithm, third parties can interfere - in this case forum's admins or mods can ban the account or do anything they like with the post. Lastly, the forum can be just shut down and you will own nothing.

The thing is, crypto ecosystem broke those rules for a lot of people and made them more likely to trust crypto scammers. People who used faucets or airdrops and viewed them as free money could then believe in those doubler scams, because they have already got something for free, and they ignore the crucial difference that the doubler scams require you to send your money first. Similarly, people who got lucky and invested in shitcoins during a pump are more likely to believe in "get rich quick" scams like cloud mining or trading groups.

You mention merit a lot, but posts that attract a lot of merit and quality posts are not the same things. Merit is subjective, it's essentially a way to signal "I like something about this post", or quite commonly "I agree with this post".

If you think about quality posts as well-written and well-informed posts, then the whole board of Development and Technical discussion would be like 70% quality posts, yet way less than 70% of its posts get merited.

People who know nothing about Bitcoin think that you can only buy whole coin increments.

However, poor people really can't invest in Bitcoin, because they can't invest in anything - all the money that they get are instantly spent on their basic needs, and if they manage to save some tiny amount, it will have to be spent too when there's some emergency. This is why Bitcoin can't solve povery, only middle class and above can afford to HODL for years regardless of the market.

Can Chinese people easily open foreign bank accounts? I thought China is really hard on controlling the flow of capital to prevent it fleeing from their country. Chances are, Chinese citizens will be getting caught while sending or receiving funds from foreign exchanges/bank accounts if their regulators have enough control, which I assume they do, knowing how totalitarian China is.


Bitcoin community has a huge persecution complex and this idea that the major powers of this world, like banks and governments, are always plotting against Bitcoin. But if any of that was true, those powers would have simply banned all white market uses of Bitcoin.

The market already knows that China will not allow crypto-related things to operate officially in their country, so even if they will have tools to enforce their ban more deeply, it doesn't change things much. Bitcoin's price does not dependent on level of adoption by Chinese citizens, regardless if it's legal use or underground p2p use.

Gotta love this "quality" journalism when they take two events that happened in the same timeframe and say the one event caused the other, totally ignoring all the other factors. And Bitcoin is currently at 66% of the ATH price, not 50%, and it even recovered to 5/6 of the ATH price recently.

And just recently Bitcoin only lost $2k as the reaction to China ban, which is really nothing and can be recovered very quickly if the bull market will resume.

Beginners very easily overestimate their competence, this is known as Dunning–Kruger effect. Beginners think that they are special, that they are smarter than those losers who lost millions on bad trade. They think that watching a 15 minute Youtube hype video from a guru and reading a Medium article counts as doing research. And buying during a bull market and seeing your portfolio grow by 30% after a day or two certainly contributes to the overconfidence.

If someone seriously wants to get into trading, I would advice them to set some tiny monthly limit, like $100 and only use that for trading and not a penny more for the first 2-3 years, and only then if you are in profit after all those years proceed to increase your trading capital.

Anyone who reads any news from time to time understands that China is a dystopian government that wants to control every aspect of their citizen's lives, and they are relatively successful at it. For example, many Chinese citizens don't know anything about the Tiananmen square massacre or just avoid discussing it with anyone. It's no surprise that they ban Bitcoin, which was created to grant people financial freedom. I'm sure a lot of people who currently use Bitcoin in China will keep using it, but the rate of adoption by new users will drastically slow down, because people would be scared to break laws.