Use the mass as a counter indicator. I have been doing that for a good while now and it seems to work fairly well. People need to lose hope and confidence will we see the market do something towards the north.

Too many people are still holding on to their coins waiting for something to happen, either because they bought in recently hoping to book a profit, or because they are deeply under water from last year's frenzy.

I think a proper shakeout will happen once we break through the main support people thought was impossible to break. It may sound harsh, but peculative markets don't have mercy for its participants.

Sounds too good to be true actually. I'm not even sure how that works right now if you cash out Bitcoin to USDC (Coinbase's stablecoin) for example. Common sense tells me that the same rules apply when you cash out to fiat.

If it is supposed to be a proxy to fiat, which it is, it would make sense that you are taxed similarly. If it isn't yet, I'm sure governments will do everything they can to catch up on stablecoins to get rid of that legal loophole.

Bitstamp isn't nested as firmly in this ecosystem like Bitfinex, and there is less to fud about with how people consider Bitstamp to be one of the most reliable exchanges in the industry.

Whales are the first to exit an exchange when they start to feel that things might turn ugly, which immediately results in the cold wallets of that exchange to shrink, and that's exactly what happened to Bitfinex.

https://bitinfocharts.com/bitcoin/address/3Nxwenay9Z8Lc9JBiywExpnEFiLp6Afp8v

As long as Bitstamp's cold wallet holdings hover between 90-100k BTC there isn't much to worry about.

I'm always bullish, that's something that will never change. The months of sideways action is what I consider to be a crucial aspect for any long term minded investor or believer to dollar cost average into this market.

I know that we won't hover around current levels for ever, but there isn't much at this point that will push Bitcoin higher. We might see an end of the year rally, but these rallies never last long and only serve speculators.

If there is something to look forward to, then it's for sure the block halving with how the market traditionally increases well before the halving takes place. Maybe LN might be closer to mainstream adoption by that time as well.

I like how you remain neutral here. I'm sure that by the time LN is mature enough to handle these uses, we'll see a whole lot more coins being added for much wider exposure because there is more than just Bitcoin.

We have more than clear evidence that the services opening themselves up to a large number of crypto currencies are doing way better than their competitors just sticking with Bitcoin and Ethereum for example.

We might even see tokenized fiat currencies being easily divisible and transferable be used for micro payments. Bitcoin's progress motivates the rest to follow and you can be sure that they will follow.

Average joes don't care about decentralized currencies, they just want to use money in the most convenient possible way.

The ones we're dealing with after 2017 are the worst of the worst, especially the YouTubers thinking to know what they are talking about while they are only rehashing Coindesk and other related sites.

Not sure if anyone here knows the crypto twins, but these dudes are the prime reflection of what this space looks like, a complete shit hole filled with idiots. People want mainstream adoption, now here it is in their face.

The worst thing is that it will only get worse the deeper we dig into mainstream adoption. Everything we go through right now makes the past look like it was a glorious time where utility still somewhat mattered.

By the time quantum computers are able to challenge Bitcoin, they'll be able to challenge pretty much everything else that's considered secure right now, but hey, let's just talk about Bitcoin because that's fun and attracts clicks.

It's the same with how Bitcoin's energy consumption is constantly subject to discussion, while in reality there isn't even much to say about it anymore. It's the lack of content driving news outlets towards this nonsense.

I'm more worried about fiat to collapse than anything else, and this will likely happen far before quantum computers are near the state of forming a potential threat to a wide variety of protocols. People however don't seem to care enough.

That reminds me of how companies with a stock listing changed their name to include blockchain for the sole purpose of driving share prices up, and the worst is that it did drive up the price significantly at first.

I'm glad that there are enough investors with common sense using that as an opportunity to dump the price back down to where it started. It surprises me that regulators haven't done anything yet to discourage these practices.

It's clear by now that most of the companies doing this haven't ever dipped their feet in the blockchain world. It's insider trading and market manipulation at the same time. Must be interesting enough for regulators to combat right?

Bitcoin should be seen as a hedge to the elements of the traditional system. It conveniently will help you counter inflation with a gradual increase in net worth, where bull runs and whatnot are a welcome bonus.

The lower your expectations are in terms of crazy gains, the easier the ride up will be throughout the years, especially when we are going through bear markets like what we are experiencing right now.

The only reason people are unhappy with the flat market is because of how unrealistic their expectations were. Nothing in the world keeps going up in one straight line, just be realistic.

Investors continuously cash out profits on the way up, because not everyone is here for the tech.....

I'm not sure if that will happen, but my point of interest is how long can they maintain their position as tax friendly country to operate in. I'm sure that more countries will end up competing for the same businesses.

Another advantage of Ukraine following up on their previous statements, is that it may very well be Russia's testbed. If Ukraine does well and there is next to no negative impact, they will follow for sure.

It may even result in a situation where Russia will outcompete Ukraine with dirty tricks, which they aren't shy of to fall back on. It's a step forward for crypto overall, hope it will reach other countries as well.

It's horrible to deal with these domains with how you can't access them via a regular browser. It requires you to use a proxy to access them, which goes beyond that what a regular user is willing to do in order to browse a website.

The majority of the people don't need a decentralized domain because they either have nothing to hide or be afraid of, or they don't see anything of useful nature in it, and we can't really blame them for that.

Currently you can also register .eth domains, and I'm sure there are plenty of more decentralized domains that we (or at least I) don't know of. At least Ethereum provides a solid platform for easy and secure transfer of ownership.

Institutions are smart players. They can simply choose to softly support the spot market but go big on Bitcoin on the OTC market, which in no shape or form affects the spot market.

Bitcoin's spot market is too thin to buy into for institutions, and there are no financial products offering long term exposure they can buy into yet. An ETF would be great for that, but we all know that the SEC has other plans.

The only interesting part of the article is that it might help legacy banks to provide custodial services, which from there might stimulate them to create their own financial products based on Bitcoin.

I'm sure most of the people who joined last year have no clue about the technical side of Bitcoin. The price that kept going up continuously was the only motivating factor for them to enter this market.

So yes, fomo has been the main trigger of last year's bull run, which is exactly why it went up that hard, and exactly why it won't be going up this year. Bull runs always happen when no one expects them to happen.

People expecting a bull run this or next year have already bought in, and the newbies who entered last year already have coins and are desperately waiting for the price to recover.

When everyone expects a bull run to happen and have done all the buying in advance, there is no real demand. We have seen what happens when the price breaks through the $7000 mark, we're confronted with sellers only.

Fiat isn't fully backed in physical form either. Meaning that if we are all trying to physically withdraw our fiat currencies, it simply isn't possible because we wont come further than 1-2% in total.

This directly implies that 98% of all the fiat in circulation only exists in digital form, while Bitcoin can be turned into physical money by simply exchanging private keys in form of coins, paper and plastic notes, and so forth.

In other words, Bitcoin technically speaking is more money than fiat is, but it enjoys multiple orders of magnitude less acceptance. We can definitely work towards more acceptance.

That's his problem. I don't feel for him at all, especially in times where you know that pulling off shit like this targeted at airports is going to be taken very seriously by the respective authorities.

If he isn't aware of what he put himself into, he needs mental help because there is something horribly wrong with him in that case. Him being a frustrated teenager is definitely not an excuse for what he did.

The severity of his punishment comes down to how much of a signal to the outside world the authorities want it to be.

People are quite on the wrong track if they believe that altcoins are bad for Bitcoin. Not sure if any of you figured out already, but altcoins are making sure that a million or more Bitcoins are taken out of direct circulation.

What do you think will happen when +1 million Bitcoins suddenly no longer have a purpose? Right, they will be dumped on the market which will bring us back to where we were a couple of years ago in terms of pricing.

I know most of the altcoins are utter garbage coins, but they help keep Bitcoins out of circulation, and that's what matters here. Try to look at things differently. Most of Bitcoin's volumes are generated against altcoins.

Ethereum is the best option to build on, and there is nothing that comes even close to the programmability and overall economical support that Ethereum offers, not even TRON, NEO, EOS, and so forth.

The only downside is that it needs to find a way to scale far beyond what it is capable of right now. The more that runs on top of it, the more network congestion there is during peak usage moments, and thus the higher the fees.

I must say that I was quite hostile towards Ethereum, but I actually see its advantages. It doesn't even compete with Bitcoin for utility, neither does it compete with Bitcoin for hashrate. No reason to be worried.

It's an 'exchange' mainly attracting users from Tunisia as pointed out above, very likely because these people don't have many other options to utilize due to the limitations that they are facing.

In the western world we have many options to choose from, but that's not the case for certain other countries, which is why people there are more likely to use what we consider unknown and unsafe exchanges.

I can't even imagine how difficult it is for some people to buy themselves into Bitcoin. There are hundreds of services in Europe alone allowing me to buy Bitcoin at any time of the day without hassle.

How often do these indicators in crypto actually lead to anything? People guessed so much left and right in the last months, that they finally accepted that the market isn't going to do much other than to hover around $6500.

The descending triangle that people were eagerly looking forward to with how they believed it would result in a massive breakout didn't lead to anything. Here we are still moving sideways, and there doesn't seem to be an end in sight.

People need to admit that they are guessing at best, even when it is based on whatever form of analysis. I don't see traders for once admit that there isn't much to gain here, and that it's not as profitable as people think it is. That's honesty.

How do you know people were becoming millionaires? Is that just an assumption because the price went up like crazy, or actually based on facts in form of you knowing people who did see their net worth push over a million?

The thing with the price going up like 1000% is that only a very few investors manage to hodl through such an increase. Most investors cash out around 25>50>75>100% because no one knows it will pump that high.

That's why I cringe when people talk about how you could have been a millionaire with only a $100 investment. Who aside from a small number of OG hodlers and true believers managed to hodl their coins from that point to where we are right now?