If you think logically, launching a dex is against his main centralized exchange, so there must be something that will allow Binance to still make profit in form of fees or something. On top of that, how decentralized is decentralized? I don't trust any of this because you don't shoot yourself in the foot like that, especially with how their Binance brand will organically direct a lot of users to their dex.

I personally prefer Bisq to keep growing and attract more liquidity, which will take some time, but with how exchanges tend to mess up, more people will look for a decentralized alternative. It's not as fast as centralized exchanges, but it gets the job done and works perfectly fine for smaller occasional buy low sell high investors/traders.

There isn't. If we didn't break yearly support last year that green line would be positioned differently, and the most important thing is that once again, it's a line drawn afterwards.

Currently we're past the date the market found its all time bottom back in 2015 and it's doing exactly what it did back then, which is move sideways, and I expect this to drag on for a couple of more months. At some point the sellers run out of ammunition (if it didn't happen already) and we'll see the price slowly but surely find its way up.

We have gone through a brutal selloff last year, how much more is there still to sell? At current levels it's way easier to support the price than when it was hovering over the $6000 level.

Even if you have 'enough knowledge' there simply isn't a way to have it magically work in your favor. In the end, even the most skilled traders are purely guessing/betting that the price will go up or down. In that case it's more like an educated guess/bet, but you get the idea; there are no certainties in any market, you still expose yourself to plenty of risks.

People tend to overestimate themselves after a few profitable trades and up the amounts they allocate to each trade, and then burn themselves because the market doesn't always do what you want it to do. If you expect to profit off of each and every trade you are asking for problems. You don't have respect for the market and it's unreliable nature, especially here in crypto.

Well, volatility is impossible to time/predict. It may look like it's relatively stable for a week or two, but then it bounces up and down like crazy out of nothing, or it continues to plunge like what we have seen when ~$5800 support broke last year. The uncertainty that comes with this market makes crypto unreliable as day to day currency.

It's waiting for a stablecoin that's fast, cheap to use, and more importantly, scalable. Most of the stablecoins run on Ethereum, or in case of USDT on Bitcoin, but both networks severely lag when stressed, and aren't scalable on-chain to have the mass use them. I guess time will tell what stablecoin will find a solution to all problems the current ones struggle with, but we have at least had a glimpse of what the future may look like with the current generation of stablecoins.

I noticed that too with certain local exchanging services. Every chunk of Bitcoin they had in their reserve was sold in a matter of seconds. Refresh page, 2.5BTC in reserve, refresh again, 0BTC in reserve, and that went on for weeks. It went so far, that one of these services paid like 5% over spot to have people sell coins to them, and they still didn't manage to get people to sell enough coins to them to meet the demand.

It was pure madness, but these hype phases don't last long as we have seen. Current valuations look way healthier and stimulate smart money to enter and accumulate.

This market does gain a decent level of adoption from bubbles, because all the insane price action we go through attracts people, and while a large part gets burned and doesn't look back for a while, a lot of these new market participants are here to stay. What other than bubbles and crazy price action has the crypto industry as a whole to market itself with?

Sure, the price action is pure speculation where people are basically front running the potential of whatever they invest in, but you can't get around the fact that after every bubble, there is more adoption/user activity.

It's just a matter of time before every payment processor will start accepting payments in stablecoins, and I'm certain that this will turn out to be something that will gain a lot of traction in the forthcoming years. Coingate already accepts TrueUSD, so the first step has been set. Considering that most people don't need censorship resistant payments, these stablecoins will do well, very likely better than most decentralized cryptos combined eventually.

Stability is such an important factor that regardless of how fast and cheap your transactions are, if the price jumps up and down like crazy, it's not a serious day to day currency.

This article has nothing to do with Bitcoin at all, it's just using Bitcoin to have potential readers click on it, because hey, Bitcoin + NASA is much cooler to click on than blockchain + NASA.

Bitcoin doesn't need these silly examples to point out how much usefulness it provides, because in this case a database solution works just as fine. The blockchain hype goes on.

In order for the US to approve an ETF, there needs to be more local market making and demand, because what can you do when all the crazy and shady stuff happens on exchanges they have no control over legally? I don't blame the SEC for not approving an ETF, this market just isn't ready for it yet, so let's wait and see what Bakkt and the Nasdaq entering this space will do. I'm certain that the odds of an approval are much higher with these players on board.

In the end, the market not responding either means the price has been adjusted (Jan Van Eck mentioned that they pulled 4000 Bitcoin investors which is quite interesting) last year to reflect this, or it simply doesn't care anymore. Let's be honest, they don't figure out spontaneously that it's better to withdraw their application. It's something they have been pondering over for months.

It's impossible to factually prove that exchanges are generating fake volumes. It however makes it easier to assume if you look at the nature of the volume, the incentives (e.g. ranking up on CMC, transaction fee mining, bonuses handed out to people who generate the most volume, etc), the traffic they generate, and compare to that to the more competent exchanges.

Common sense tells you that an exchange that pops up out of nothing generating hundreds of millions in volume with a very poor web rank, is very likely participating in fraudulent activity.

Bitfinex is more a spoofer than a volume manipulator. Not saying they don't also manipulate volumes, they likely do to an extent, but it's nothing compared to what the new exchanges on the block do.

It may sound like exchanges won't be doing it, because it doesn't look professional at all, but I'm pretty certain that most competent exchanges engrave the private keys of their main cold wallets, the ones people usually assume have been lost because there hasn't been any activity for years, but are still controlled by an exchange.

Coinbase is a perfect and recent example. Out of nothing coins that haven't moved for like 3 or so years have started moving, and everyone assumed it was a whale, but were simply the deep cold wallets of Coinbase.

Obviously, hacks always concern hot wallets. Cold wallets can't be gained access to through the internet, and if it is possible anway, then it simply isn't a cold wallet, but a hot wallet.

The interesting aspect of these hacks, while they are horrible events for those who are affected, is that they make sure that a lot of coins are taken out of circulation, because as you also pointed out, there is very little incentive to have them be sent to a centralized exchange with the risks of losing these coins.

Of course, it doesn't mean these coins won't eventually find their way to an exchange, but hey, it will be a very time consuming process, and it requires the hackers to properly distribute coins in a way that if an exchange happens to notice shady activity, they only lose a small percentage instead of all "their" coins.

Well, the trend is your friend they say, and when a market is stuck in a long ass lower high cycle you can be sure that most of the technical analysis folks won't expect much to change here. The good thing is that so many people are expecting a plunge below our current $31xx low, that we might be up for a surprise (i.e. a contrarian move).

$3500 is very strong and every attempt so far to break out lower has been dealt with swiftly, so we'll see how long the support there can hold.

Back in 2017 people calling tops were wrong time on time again, and the same is happening with those who are calling bottoms. Good thing is that just like how the price can't go up endlessly, it can't go down endlessly, and I'm pretty certain that we are close. As long as the market respects the 200 wma just like it did back in 2015 there isn't much to worry about.

Governments don't like each other, it's just so that they tolerate each other to a certain (mostly financially motivated) degree.

I'm pretty certain that most governments are better off regulating the centralized ecosystem around Bitcoin rather than to attack it and have people go 'underground' and be way harder to follow and combat.

Drugs obviously is a completely different category, but the interesting aspect of it is that most countries in the world are extremely hostile towards drugs, and it still manages to be a market worth hundreds of billions of dollars, and that on a yearly basis. In other words, you can't prevent people from using something they want to use (regardless of how harsh the penalties are), especially when it comes to something like Bitcoin that provides financial freedom and an actual utility as money.

I think that most people here could have told you that as well. 

In the end, even if they end up using blockchain tech, I don't see how any of you guys will benefit from that. It's not in their interest to pass on the efficiency gains to clients in form of faster and cheaper services. They want you to keep paying disgustingly high fees for transactions that are processed in a timely fashion.

On top of that, financial institutions might have switched to blockchain tech years ago already. It's not that they are completely new to the space, they just want you to think so in order to justify high legacy fees for slow and often unreliable services. Fees are a gold mine, they won't let go of that.

It applies to everything related to crypto, even platforms not touching fiat at all.

Unfortunately, yes. People need to think twice before signing up to an exchange or service thinking that they are exempt from KYC for ever, because that's not the case at all. We have had numerous cases where exchanges silently updated their terms and trapped their users with no choice but to verify in order to withdraw.

In the end, people didn't have any sort of anonymity even without KYC, so they don't lose anything. If you also take into consideration that people don't shy away from walking themselves through verification levels for the sake of getting a $10-$20 bonus, you know that it won't matter much in this case.

It will matter for a small percentage of those who are more aware of the risks of handing over their personal information to an entity they don't know, but they will stick to the more legitimate services in the space as result of that.

Don't underestimate the demand for these coins. In all cases, the lack of liquidity in their spot books is an amazing opportunity for whatever large player to buy an insane amount of whatever shitcoin off-exchange, use little capital to pump spot price, sell off-exchange, and repeat.

It's all about percentage returns of most investors/traders, so they just look for an opportunity to make a decent bit of money, and this is a great way to do it, especially with how Binance is one of the largest holders of crypto currencies in the space.

If you look at the volumes, EOS is generating nearly twice as much volume as something like XRP, and that for over a year now. I can see a lot of demand popping up here.

That crash was fierce because no one (or almost no one) expected it, which also applies to price increases, which is why more bearishness is welcome here. It really seems that people have started to get comfortable with $3500 with how strong it holds, so we might be up for a surprise in the coming weeks or months, especially with how the first quarter doesn't really favor Bitcoin in terms of price action.

Breaking $6000 was what I needed to wake up again. I was way too comfortable with how strong the support was at that point. Everything we go through is a lesson that makes you handle the next market cycle in a much better way, so there is nothing lost here, and while it may not look like so for people right now, this experience will pay off in the future.

These are the threads you want to see pop up as bull. Dumb money functions as counter indicator (e.g. they buy when you should sell, and sell when you should buy), so whenever you see them freak out like this, know that we might be near a point at which we will bottom out (if we haven't done so already).

It would have been a bit more realistic if it was $1000 OP referred to, but hey, it still signals bearishness.

Where is kwukduck when you need him, he was a pro in making people freak out. His absence might indicate that he doesn't know what's going on, or he simply doesn't care anymore. Don't think he's banned considering his BTC address in his profile, which is usually gone when someone is banned IIRC.

Not only that, but most governments don't see crypto as a threat, not even in the slightest possible way. Crypto will only become a threat if it is being adopted as currency by the mass, which isn't likely to happen any time soon. The only thing governments need to do is to advance their fiat system and offer people more speed, convenience, etc. That's more than enough to shake off crypto in its entirety as long as their fiat currencies don't implode.

The very fact that most governments have been surprisingly friendly towards crypto, just shows that they don't see it as a threat. I'm glad for that actually, because the longer they let it grow, the harder it will be to combat whenever they finally start seeing it as a legit threat to their own fiat currencies.