I remember that there was some serious discussion about Bitfinex and its post hack debt. The main point basically was that they created USDT out of thin air to compensate people for the coins they lost as result of their "hack".

If you think back, it's very suspicious how Bitfinex managed to buy out all of its debt that quickly, especially with how large the amount was. Back then they weren't the money making machine they are right now.

I know it's all speculation and there is no evidence to back it up, but you have to admit that it stinks. If they keep refusing balance audits they will keep stinking, its that simple. I will never use that exchange. Better safe than sorry.

I don't believe anything what these smaller exchanges come up with, because they either blatantly run off with people's money, or they claim to be hacked and blame hackers for what the operators themselves did.

You always have the public opinion against you as smaller exchange, even when you are actually victim of theft by hackers, because you are supposed to take care of security and proper hot wallet withdrawal methods.

I remember that back when I was trading altcoins in 2015/2016, some of the smaller exchanges were processing withdrawals manually. Why can't these exchanges do the same? It should be the new trend.

Who cares about convenience in these situations. You can bet your two pennies that the victims would have wished they processed withdrawals manually.

Absolutely nothing is wrong with that. I would even like to say that it improves scalability potential with how you no longer have to care about another side thinking its own roadmap and implementation is the one to follow.

Remember the drama we went through before the Bcash split? They are gone and we no longer have to care about what their plans are, which is the best thing that could happen to Bitcoin.

I get it that people want to protect Bitcoin, or that they feel they have to, but if it is the unbreakable powerhouse people say it is, then why worry about what's going to happen? Let the economy do its work.

Most forks will fail anyway because they won't be backed by any noteworthy players. There won't be a second Bcash. We've seen the worst.

There is no way to know if we found the bottom already. People wrongly assumed that the previous support level would hold strong because of the base mining cost, but that turned out to be based on nothing but empty hope.

Mining cost is different for each miner, and isn't anywhere near $6000 for the largest farms, and will likely only reduce with how they work towards their own ways of generating energy, and then we have more efficient hardware.

My word to the everyone else is to remain conservative and don't take support levels for granted. Crypto currencies (even Bitcoin) can fall way below the levels you think are insanely low already. Expect the unexpected.

You know that theories like that don't work, right? The proper way to act and benefit from a market that could go down further, is to dollar cost average as long as you need to buy the final bottom.

You can't possibly know where that bottom is. It could be anywhere between $2000-$5000 or we might have seen the final bottom already. If you sell now you'll lose out by having to buy back your coins at much higher levels.

I say much higher levels because you'll initially wait for the price to correct again, which it just as easily might not, and by the time you decide to buy back, you get less coins for the same amount of fiat back.

It's backed by both Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan, which is a toxic combination, but that applies to Bitfinex with it's USDT as well. Coinbase at least easily let's you cash out USDC to fiat, which can't be said about Bitfinex.

The positive side of USDC is that it will swallow USDT's market share, and the less of a deal that token is, the better it is for everyone in the long run. It's another way to distribute your risk exposure, which isn't all that bad, right?

Fork drama is a reality check for people. Miners are easy to convince to mine something else if you pay more (referring to SV camp), your hashrate isn't actually yours if you use Roger's or Bitmain's pools.

I remember reading an article a couple of months ago where something was proposed to stop the centralization around pools to give individual miners more control over what they mine and so on. Sounds like we need it now.

Let the price sink further, it seems that this industry doesn't even deserve to be where it stands right now. I wasn't surprised that the price dipped under the $6000 mark and won't be surprised if it dips under $5000.

People never believe that Bitcoin can increase or decrease naturally. If it goes up it has to be related to manipulation, and the same applies to when the price goes down. This market is crazy to its core and driven by speculation.

Anyone can dump or pump the price as long as you have sufficient funds to do it with. Some times whales get excited and buy up the price, and some times they lose patience and dump the price overselling the market. Not a big deal.

I actually like that people can express their confidence or lack of confidence by buying or selling USDT, because it's the people doing it, not a central bank trying to dictate the market to have it play out in its advantage.

Ethereum has a few upgrades ready to be implemented, but they are being delayed continuously. I wouldn't count on anything to change in this regard, especially with how it potentially could drag on for a couple of more years.

The bear market means less network congestion on the Ethereum network, and thus less desire from the side of developers to rush their upgrades. Upgrade delays are mostly an indication of unstable software.

What stings me the most is the fact that there is no hard cap on Ethereum. Their only effort to counter inflation is to lower block rewards from 3 to 2ETH, but still, not a hard cap. Once they get around that, I'll dig in and invest.

By dollar cost averaging your entry points, you effectively counter the risks of the price going down further. These are the times that people should be buying, and not when the market looks like it's going back up again.

I'm thankful for the opportunity to buy any amount below the $6000 mark, and if it falls more, I'll buy more, it's that simple. The lower we are, the more likely it is that the bottom is near. In other words, pretty low risk exposure.

People usually buy the wrong dips, which is why some are reluctant to consider price dips as a good opportunity. It's also a matter of common sense at the end of the day. Buying the dip from $19k to $17k is suicide, not an opportunity.

Bitcoin gets thrown into it whether we like it or not, because both BTC and BCH compete for hashrate, and Bitmain doesn't shy away from using BTC hashrate to protect their BCHABC chain against Craig the scammer.

I read that some people believe that when hashrate from BTC moves to BCH, especially so close to the difficulty adjustment, that a lower difficulty results in more coin inflation and thus miners dumping their coins.

What they forget is that there is over 10EH of hashrate not doing anything at the moment, and this hashrate will enter BTC as Bitmain's pools transfer a chunk of their hashrate to BCH. There are no winners here, crypto as a whole is the loser.

No one will end up using BCHSV. It will crash when they stop pointing their hashpower to something that costs them like $50,000 a day at least. Mining BCHSV blocks is capital destruction.

As expected, hashpower from Bitcoin.com, BTC.com, Antpool and ViaBTC has gone from BTC to supporting the BCHABC chain, and it may last a couple of days, or weeks, all depends how stubborn Craig Wright is.

At least, the miners who were waiting for a spot on BTC's chain can now enter, and they can look forward to a difficulty decrease as well, what more can a miner wish for?

Agreed. It has always been a currency before it turned into a speculative vehicle. SilkRoad and a couple of other sites selling legal products were the first ever use case demonstrations, and that's what we should go back to.

I'm however less optimistic about its current use case as a currency without LN being optimally functional. People started to believe/=/accept that the store of value aspect is the only thing that matters.

When you're here for the gains only, yeah it's easy to convince yourself of that, but I'm glad that the other group of Bitcoiners want to see it become cash as well, and I'm in that camp as well. Use matters and attracts value.

As far as I managed to read into how this works, payment ID's are more of an exchange-service requirement, but considering that HitBTC isn't showing you a payment ID, it's likely unnecessary in this specific case.

To be sure, send a very small amount of BCN to HitBTC as test transaction. If it goes through without any problems you can be sure that the rest will safely go through as well. If you want to be 100% sure better contact their support.

I know contacting support of exchanges is quite a slow process, but these are at least the options that you have.

I'm not sure if I understand you correctly, they'll only tell you what you have to pay until they actually put your add online? Pretty weird way of doing business to be honest. Never seen or heard that before.

They should be able to tell you what you have to pay for ad slots before actually accepting the deal. Anyway, I had a look at Reddit, and it really seems that no one is able to know what they charge for their ad slots.

The only thing they say is that you have to contact them at https://etherscan.io/contactus

Wouldn't really surprise me to be honest. Both banks and news outlets have a bias towards bad publicity. Banks want to give Bitcoin a bad name, where news outlets are money hungry entities looking to bank on drama.

It could even be the government itself. The central bank of Poland once paid social media stars to discredit Bitcoin and crypto currencies by highlighting how dangerous and risky they are as an asset.

It's pretty easy to make up something and ask for ridiculous amounts of Bitcoin, where the higher the amount is, the more attention you'll get. I never take any of these articles for face value, neither should others do.

True, but that's directly the main obstacle for most noobs. Reputable exchanges generally have strict KYC/AML policies in place, and they are firm on not listing utter garbage coins.

It's not for nothing that exchanges as Yobit exist and continue to gain popularity as the larger exchanges become too much of an obstacle for people. It's greed over common sense in this industry.

Another effective way of attracting noobs is advertising through Facebook and whatnot. That's where most of the worst noobs come from, and also explains why they don't know what crypto is about.

They are here for a sweet payday, but all they get is a very expensive booty smacking treatment.

Guess what coin he'll be going back to when he thinks there is no other option left.... Right, he'll go back to the coin he has been trashing for over a year because it's the only one being able to withstand this hashrate war.

No other coin has a similar network effect as Bitcoin, and he knows that. He said that he would remove Bitcoin from his main wallet, but still hasn't done so and I believe he won't even dare to do it.

OP: I think the main problem is that CSW is out to be the sole ruler of his own version of bitchcoin (no typo). I strongly believe that he would fork off anyway and used the momentum right now to do it instead of later on.

People come here to get rid of their government, and they are yet again witnessing the same power play against them. It sucks.

I don't see how it's shady. As far as I can see, they have done everything needed to notify users that coins will be delisted. The only debatable aspect is their time frame in which they expect users to withdraw their funds.

There is a saying: you get what you pay for. I think that's the right way to describe these exchanges. If you want better, more professional service, go to an exchange as Kraken or Binance, it's that simple.

People have to accept that these things can happen when they bet on shitcoins. There are over 10,000 coins and tokens in existence, try to pick one that doesn't screw you over one way or another, it's simply impossible.

Business as usual. People expect an increase, think $6000 is the support that won't be broken again, and the market does the exact opposite. This is why I remained so conservative in the last couple of months.

There is no point in looking for reasons, we never found out why the price went down in the last months, and we won't find out the reason for the current dump. Don't waste time trying to figure out what happened.

I managed to buy myself some coins slightly above $5400 and I am thankful for the opportunity. The price won't keep going down endlessly, that's why you have to use the current levels in your advantage to fill up your pockets.