I somewhat agree. I wonder to what degree they have been stimulating investors to pump money into crypto even near the peak levels of last year. Do they ever say no when they think it's a horrible time to enter a market?

I remember how in January I managed to convince a good friend of mine that it wasn't the right moment to invest in crypto, regardless of how low the amount was, and while he wasn't happy initially, he certainly was months later.

Some times you have to protect people from hurting themselves, even if they think they are right, and that's what these hedge funds should be doing as well. Crypto or legacy market, bull runs never last endlessly. Fact.

Definitely slow growth. I'm not here to cash out short term profits on the way up, which means that spikes have no value to me at all. I have a long term goal in mind I am working towards.

Most of the people you see complain about the current bear market are here solely for the profits. These people were also complaining about the market being boring because of how it kept hovering between $6000-$7000.

What's happening right now is that we see the real hodlers seperate themselves from the short term profit chasers, and this is very much indicating that we might be near the bottom.

From $20,000 to $4000 is an 80% correction. 90% corrections aren't unusual for crypto, but is it really worth waiting for something that might not happen? The risk to reward ratio is heavily biased towards the up side.

It's not too early to explain. The reason BTC's dominance didn't change much is because it tanked in quite a similar fashion as altcoins did. Usually it's BTC down 5%, altcoins down +10%, but the decreases were pretty even this time.

If everything goes down equally, the dominance won't move much at all. In other words, Bitcoin behaved like a shitcoin in the last few weeks. It didn't show anything of its usual strength, it kept tanking like there is no tomorrow.

The most interesting aspect to focus on is whether or not the similarities will be there on the way up as well. If not, it might very well be that altcoins will outperform Bitcoin and drag the dominance below 50% in a quick fashion.

SegWit is performing poorly with below 40% support. The main reasons transaction fees have gone down is transaction batching and more accurate fee calculation on the client side, and way less transaction activity.

It wouldn't even surprise me if next year SegWit support is still below 50% because the big block camp will continue to not have any of their sites and services upgrade due to Bcash losing its main 'selling feature' being low fees.

That's exactly why I am looking forward to more LN development. Once your funded channels are active, you no longer have to care about what happens with the main chain, or how toxic miners are. This is it.

I'm not saying they should hold the funds for ever, but it would be a good option to have Bittrex keep them for 6 more months, just in case late users come back and try to claim their coins.

It's common sense, really. An exchange more than anyone else knows that a large part of the users use their platform as wallet for storage purposes. It's not how it should be, but people do it anyway, they are stupid.

People can try to justify it all day long, but it's a form of legal theft and it stays that. They simply use people's stupidity against them and think it's all good. It's not all good. 

I'm in it for the long run. I even bought on a montly or biweekly basis when the price was hovering between $6000-$7000 for almost 10 or so months. This is the only way to buy yourself into a market that makes sense.

Most people are surfing on the sentiment of the market. In case the sentiment is up, they expect $10,000 to be broken within x number of months. Sentiment down means we'll see lower lows, potentially $3000 range.

Markets do the opposite of what people think it will be doing. 2 weeks ago people were largely bullish, and this is what we got. Now people are largely bearish, which might result in a counter bounce to the up side very soon.

Especially when you take into consideration that Tether *very likely* prints USDT out of nothing. USDC is never capable of catching up with fair play, so it has to accumulate growth slowly but throughout the years.

Tether shrinked its circulating USDT supply with 0.5 billion, which theoretically should mean that Bitfinex allowed investors to withdraw $0.5 billion from their bank account, which is shady at the very least.

People have been facing so many difficulties trying to withdraw fiat from Bitfinex, while they easily let investors "cash out" that many USDTs? No way that this is possible. It's another goxxing that we're slowly working towards.

People unfortunately don't seem to care anymore. Yobit has been as scummy as it is today for a couple of years now, and they still manage to grow their user count. The same applies to HitBTC.

You can see how they adjust their business model by adding all sorts of rubbish features, which is a clear sign that they actually research what rookies are looking for and add these features to remain relevant in the space.

People often think Yobit is pure shit, which it in reality is, but there is a marketing structure powering the success of that exchange. In other words, Yobit knows how to conduct business based on user demand.

Their latest addition is the coin pump feature. This is what people look for. People want, Yobit delivers.

It definitely looks like another cycle, but that at the same time is quite a bad signal in my opinion. It means that in all the years, crypto hasn't changed one single bit. It's still the casino it was back in the very early days.

Today we yet again tested the $4000 mark, which resulted in a quick bounce to $4350 but it's not looking good. The more often you test the same support levels, the more likely it is that they will break.

It's not the cause, just an enhancement of the already bad market sentiment. It does however point out how easy it is to attack another chain without actually owning much mining gear.

You simply have to make sure that you pay more than the block rewards of BTC to finance an attack on whatever SHA-256 coin. Miners don't care what their hashrate is used for, they only want to get paid properly.

It's not easy to work around the lack of liquidity, because even with Bakkt and Fidelity, the spot exchanges are setting the prices, and they are the main reason there is no sufficient liquidity available because of their shady nature.

Wiring fiat to an exchange isn't difficult at all. The problem is that wiring fiat to an exchange is similar to playing Russian roulette with your funds, which is the main point. Today it's there, tomorrow it might be gone.

Talking about Fidelity, do we have an actual confirmation of them entering the crypto space? Most of what I have read is about them offering custody services for various crypto assets, but there isn't much to find about actual trading.

I'm not keen on anything related to the current on-chain scaling solutions, but this is pretty huge news. The increase in channel funding signals more progress, and thus a higher level of trust in the technology.

+4000 nodes is quite an achievement in itself as well, especially when you take into consideration that Bcash has around 2000 nodes deployed. Imagine where LN stands when we're 12 months further in time.

With more commonly used platforms hopping on board people will have more incentive to actually start using LN, because the selection of accepted stores or platforms is still very low right now. Everything takes time to develop.

It's definitely true that crypto isn't the only asset class correcting, but it's somewhat interesting that while crypto is being praised by people to not be correlated with the traditional markets, it actually has been for a while.

It really seems that anything that fits in the category speculation is being dumped because investors aim to park capital in that what they think offers more solidity, and I honestly can't blame them for that.

Regarding BCH, I don't consider that to be anything worth looking at, but if enough investors and traders think it does matter, then it will matter. It's the power of the mass that counts at the end of the day, and the mass is in full panic mode.

It's not solely about old versus young. They look at the situation in a different way. Let's put it like this, if you buy a property and the value tanks like 50% or more, which is possible in some areas, you still have that property.

Imagine how people think about crypto assets? If crypto tanks 50% they believe the end is near, because there aren't any fundamentals that you can name up allowing crypto to have some form of base value.

That's exactly why I don't blame anyone for not digging into crypto from the regular market. I am happy already if they allocate 1% of their net worth to Bitcoin at some point in the future. Everything above that is a bonus.

It sounds so easy, but yet people aren't actually able to benefit from shorting the market, or from swing trading now the volatility is back. People need to admit that they suck at trading, which isn't something to be afraid of to admit.

Out of curiosity I have used an app allowing me to trade with virtual--nonexistent funds, and I have done well to avoid trading with real money, because my trading adventure with that app once again proved that I will rekkt myself.

What's wrong with simply buying the market down? If you allocate 5-10% of your balance to buy every $250 dip from current levels, I am sure that you will eventually buy the bottom if we aren't done tanking yet.

You fully agree with total stupidity? Wow. This is pretty shocking to be honest. It's already bad that people are too lazy to activate 2FA, but it's beyond anything to intentionally not want to use it to secure your account.

I am actually surprised that exchanges haven't yet forced 2FA security upon their users by now, because it's basic security etiquette and fits in the category of common sense. Not using it is asking for problems.

Price goes down hard, not long after Bakkt out of nothing announced that they will delay their futures platform..... At what price were the CBOE and CME futures announced? IIRC it was somewhere around the $4000 mark. We're back there.

I'm glad that more people started to pick up on that, because I knew it would bring back some form of relief to this market. It doesn't mean we won't tank deeper, but it feels good seeing no decline today.

I'm pretty sure that whenever an ETF is finally approved, the price will rocket up well before the news is made public, that's how things seem to work I guess, too bad to average person is always the one who bites the dust.

Perfectly timed fud. If whatever entity needs fiat to pay bills and whatnot, the easiest option is to sell crypto assets instead of using your own reserves. It happens all the time, regardless of the price.

I have been selling coins in the past as well, not because I wanted to, but because I had to. I'm glad that I no longer have to do that, but I'm sure that there are enough people here who do keep selling coins to fill up gaps.

Another important factor is that even if they sell at current levels, they booked a more than impressive net result. Where else can you book these returns? Things aren't as bad as they seem.....

Institutions won't ever say 'hey, we're here!'. They are in the game already to some degree, slowly building up a legal framework for their slower counterparts to enter through financial instruments people here dislike.

I think we're slowly working towards crypto becoming a legal and well accepted asset class on its own, but it might take a decade or more to reach that level, but it's perfectly fine.

The internet for example isn't even near where it should be, and this offers amazing opportunities to buy yourself into, especially when you take into consideration that there are still billions of people without internet.

More people connected to the internet means more exposure for Bitcoin.

Nah. I see the dump as a positive sign, because sellers can't keep selling endlessly. At lower levels sellers need to sell more coins to impact the market, because fiat obviously is gaining an upper hand.

You have to look at the price and calculate the risk vs reward ratio, and at current levels there is way more upwards potential than downwards potential, especially with the block halving coming closer and closer.

I think we could see more selling going on, maybe even a $3000 visit, but that's an opportunity for you to utilize. Buying at these lower levels significantly lowers your overall buying price.

I strongly believe that the price will go up gradually and pick up pace in Q2 of 2019 as more entities, which very likely are institutions, are out to accumulate Bitcoin before the block halving takes place and thus not pay a premium later on.

It's obvious that JM is only out to gain more public influence. The easiest way of doing that is make crazy predictions, and it seems to work out well for him with how we keep talking about this lunatic.

Don't get me wrong, he has valuable input on various subjects within his circle of expertise, but as soon as he steps outside that circle, he starts talking nonsense, and it's only getting worse unfortunately.

The loudest and most active public faces in crypto are inflicting the most damage to this industry. Who do you think rookies are looking up to? McAfee. They'll become just as trashy as McAfee himself after a while.