We're still seeing quite strong resistance at the $4k level.

I think that we've already seen the stability that comes at the bottom of bear markets, which would suggest that a recovery will be underway soon. Personally, as I've said before, I don't expect at this point the lows of the past to be tested. It is evident to me at least that a trend reversal will be happening in the future soon, if not already occurring, due to the fact that past bear markets have all concluded at around the same percentage loss(~75%) and time frame (1-1.5 yrs) as what is currently the case.

I think we'll hang in the $3k-5k range for a while though, even if the resistance at $4k clears. I don't think the market sentiment is that bullish yet, nor is it ready for a full on bullish breakout. It'll be interesting to see the psychological effects of halving on the market though, there could be some fomo there.

I think that the title of the article is really, really misleading.

They're not saying that bitcoin will necessarily be threatening the existence of banks or something like that. Rather, all that is being said is the fact that the volatility of a lot of the crypto assets on offer, which banks may be interested in investing, will pose a risk to the solvency or investment portfolio of banks. That's literally all.

However, I disagree with the statement made here:


You can already see increased adoption of bitcoin as a store of value, where fiat has been destabilised in countries such as Venezuela. Bitcoin can also circumvent draconian capital control policies that may prevent people from immigrating overseas, for example. So there are specific usage cases for sure.

Payforksmining is a scam company, it's simple as that.

I've heard of them before and people have already been scammed. There is pretty much no way that that they are doing what they claim they are, which is actually mining. The ROI that you have received in the past has most likely been the result of their ponzi structure, i.e. paying back old investors with new investors money.

It doesn't matter here whether or not shipping your ATM card to Pakistan is legal or not. The thing is that it is apparent they are playing on your fear and greed by requesting more money from you, when their operations have literally already exit scammed. Don't pay this sum, because you will get absolutely nothing from the so called "ATM", no matter what they tell you.

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BTW, I think this thread better belongs in service discussions, rather than legal.

It's not uncommon to see these scammers operate in this way. I think that you should understand by now that autobuy links, as well as self moderated and locked threads are literally synonymous for scams in the digital goods section, unless it's from a trusted member like TBZ.

There is no other reason for doing this other than if the user's intention is to prevent victims from posting on the sales thread directly.

Consider your money gone. It's wouldn't be surprising if more people fell for this, because they did not do your due diligence. Hopefully you have learned a lesson here - not everyone here is to be trusted, and it's best to always use escrow so you're protected in all scenarios, no matter how small the amount is. And generally just don't deal with newbies that sell these items at steep discounts, because I simply have not seen one that is legitimate.

Just because a resistance isn't broken, doesn't mean that all of a sudden, prices are going to tumble down.

I respectfully disagree with this person's sentiments, because I think that during this bear market people have gained a much more realistic expectation of the market compared to the FOMO in 2017. This means that the markets are most likely going to be less responsive to negative news, which means that panic dumping to result in a further -50% loss, especially at this stage of the bear market when the floor seems to already be in any ways is very unlikely.

This is not to mention that there are plenty of adopters now gained from the bull market of 2017, as well as the institutions that entered in 2018 that will likely spark demand for cheap coins at lower price levels.

I wouldn't necessarily call the current momentum bullish either. It could be the start of a recovery, but we are yet to see any form of major rally happen. Though, $4k resistance is only a matter of time before it gets breached.

I think that ultimately, this is the type of adoption that we should look forward to.

People accepting bitcoin through third party payment gateways or processors that hold your funds in custody for you and/or convert the payments to merchants to fiat in real time isn't really accepting bitcoin, imo, because you're never the one holding the actual bitcoin in your own address.

That's the problem with some merchants that accept bitcoin at the moment, because they see the volatility as an issue and threat. They use these third parties which not only could potentially be risky, but also essentially degrades bitcoin's utility from a full currency to just a payment processor.

In the future as volatility decreases, we should see more people accept BTC on-chain, without any third party intervention and conversion to fiat, or at least using open source payment gateways. That in itself should boost others' trust in BTC as a means of payment as well.

I don't know whether this is logical for the market to do, because it certainly seems like that bitcoin has already bottomed. I don't think that in the near future we'll see anything lower than what the bottom has currently been established by, so these shorts could certainly result in a short squeeze in the short term.

Regarding this person's prediction about bitcoin being cheap until April, I wouldn't jump to conclusions about when the rally or breakout will happen. It might not even happen in this half of the year for all that we know.

All that we know at the moment is that there is relatively low probabilities the value of BTC will drop significantly in the short term. -75-80% seems to be the range where most bear markets that bitcoin has experienced have seen its floor, and we've already been through that phase. Unlike some others, I think that it is pretty much impossible for prices to drop below $2.5k at minimum, let alone go to three figures like some people fear it will.

Lmao. I like how they added that he used "fundamental, TA, and macro indicators" at the end, while basically every single prediction that he has made in his career of spewing out sensationalist headline predictions has pretty much been all unbased, and has very rarely resulted in success.

I don't think that 2019 will see a bull market, at least not a full fledged one.

There may be a trend reversal (which we are already seeing at the moment, but have to see if it'll last), but as far as FOMO and percentage growth goes, I don't think it's safe to say it'll happen this year to the scale of 2017 yet.

It's much more likely that we'll see such FOMO build up in the market closer to the halving in 2020-2021 based on the historical cycles that bitcoin price tends to follow. Even then, it could be possible that this time round, the bull market results in much less volatility, as market cap has already grown substantially.

HitBTC already has an extremely bad reputation. I mean, just look at their reputation and trust score on this forum.

I have personally seen tens if not hundreds of HitBTC related complaints from this forum and reddit alone. So you're not the only one that is experiencing this issue. There are suspicions that HitBTC is merely doing this draconian KYC because they want to selectively make withdrawals harder, so it gives them an excuse to not pay out certain accounts. I think this theory does make sense looking from it now.


Are they requesting even more documents?

At least support has responded, but I suspect that you're going to have to deal with this issue for a while given previous cases that were similar, which involved them asking for things as sophisticated and in depth as proof of source of funds, IIRC. Keep us updated, and if you do get your money out, do not go back.

They didn't even BCC the recipients, or address them individually. This is as obvious as a scam email comes. I'm quite surprised though that this isn't in your spam folder, because generally Gmail does a good job of filtering these messages into the rightful places.

Whenever you see an article, a link, or an email that claims there is free money to be made, but the terms state that you have to download some software and/or send some funds to them first before you can claim your free coins, it is 100% a scam.

This can happen on social media platforms as well, there are phishing social media profiles doing the same thing (scammers impersonating exchanges seem to be quite the trend nowadays). If you're unsure, always check with the official site/team which the airdrop/giveaway is supposedly conducted by.

Judging from the sheer amount of current unresolved scam accusations, it is clear that BiteBTC isn't an exchange you would want to use.

Even if there is a chance that they may not selectively scam you while you use them, why take this risk when you've got better alternatives that are available that most likely offer trading pairs that they offer as well, with better customer service and reputation? There is seriously no point in using them, unless you are extremely desperate and a pair is only listed by them, in which case you should be splitting up trades into chunks so that if they defraud you, only part of your funds are gone.

But regarding the excuse that the exchange used - there is no clear way of necessarily telling who's in the right and who's in a wrong in this particular instance. But breaching of ToS as well as KYC are commonly cited excuses for holding customer funds, and imho, no matter what the excuses are, holding funds that are not yours without proper proof is always shady.

I'm still expecting the majority of price action to be sideways movement.

I think that currently, bitcoin is not posed to be necessarily entering into a bull market. The sentiment within the market is still bearish and there is still a bit of fear and uncertainty in terms of the psychology of the investors, which is honestly very normal given what had happened last year.

But I do think that prices have already bottomed at this point. The chances of bitcoin prices going under $3k is still there, albeit a very small one in my opinion, because of the strong institutional demand that will be present below that zone. But short term wise, if bitcoin does break the $4k resistance there will be a short term rally, while if it dips further I don't think it will create a new bottom. As a result, this is a good time to start dollar cost averaging if you haven't already (which you should have done ever since BTC was under $4k, imho).

How is this a flaw, at all? Bitcoin and other decentralised currencies' utility is literally derived in part from the fact that people have complete sovereignty over their funds.

Unlike banks, you don't need to worry about a third party that may block your account, or freeze the funds in them, because only you hold the private keys in bitcoin. There is no other way of accessing your wealth or tampering with it. This is what preserves the fungibility of currency as well.

The fact is that the reason why people lost money through this incident isn't because bitcoins can't be recovered, it is because they trusted a third party to hold their bitcoins in custody, who they probably have no personal knowledge of, who was completely irresponsible with the funds with no backup. That's the reason why third party exchanges and wallets should always be taken with a grain of salt.

Maybe JPMorgan blacklisting these firms are exactly as a result of the creation of their own internal cryptocurrency, in order to lessen the competition.

But anyhow, their stance on bitcoin has fluctuated and has always been quite ambiguous to begin with. I don't think that them blacklisting bitcoin companies will necessarily have a significant impact on the market, especially when it comes to the individuals that actually use the bitcoin blockchain.

Do I think that they have a valid concern from the front of AML? Probably not. Which is a part of the reason why I tend to agree with the other people here, it simply makes no sense when a corporation is trialling their own coin and actively trying to disadvantage others - seems like anti-competitive behaviour to me.

Certainly.

Both ends of the spectrums can be extremely misleading. At the one end of things, you have people who claim that bitcoin holds no value, it's not an investment, or it's a pyramid scheme - people who have absolutely no idea why or how bitcoin functions, but still has plenty of unbased criticism and often cites short term price cycles as somehow the failure of the bitcoin network as a whole.

On the other end, you've got people who claim that bitcoin's some magical solution to all our financial problems, and that somehow if bitcoin was massively adopted, there will be absolutely no debt and financial crises in the world.

You're absolutely spot on, bitcoin is neither of this. IMO, it's simply a new age currency on top of which services can be provided, and can serve as a store of value without any intermediaries or central entities.

His stories are completely inconsistent. It's clear that they are just excuses, there is no way even he believes in what he's spewing out of his mouth.

He is still yet to show his gaming license which he claims he has got, yet all the while he's using StackGambler's KYC as an excuse to continue to stall, and not process neither of your withdrawals. Judging from the video that you provided as evidence, he's already wiped your entire account's deposit, withdrawal and transfer history as well?

@crashingcrypto, what proof do you have that would suggest Compr and Stackgambler are alts of each other? And why does Stackgambler's tip to Compr all of a sudden make Compr's withdrawal request illegitimate?

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If I was Stackgambler in this situation, I would definitely not be comfortable with providing KYC directly to this person despite the fact that there may be several BTC at stake here. Not only is the chances of reimbursement low even after KYC docs are submitted (since we know that this whole KYC thing is literally just an excuse), identity fraud may be committed. At the very least, an independent trusted third party should be involved.

I'm not sure how good of an idea putting your entire pension fund into a solely cryptocurrency based fund really is.

Firstly, you are trusting someone else to hold the bitcoins for you, which takes away from the trustlessness of bitcoin that underlies its fundamentals. Secondly, the short term price swings that are present mean that if you have to access your pension fund at a relatively inopportune time, you simply don't have the freedom to continue to hold, or to have the ability to buy/sell yourself.

I'm not saying that it's a bad idea to invest in bitcoin at all. I just think that to do so, you need to hold that BTC in your own private keys and address, not in custody with a third party institution. Diversifying some of your pension savings into crypto is smart as well, just don't blindly go 100%.

I wouldn't doubt institutions will look at this opportunity in the future, as the market continues to develop and regulations clears up though.

It's quite funny that their entire site's mission is to apparently "merge the fiat and crypto worlds". Seems like that didn't turn out to be much of a success

As you may already know, your only route of recourse is really to continue to contact support, ask them for updates on the situation, and hope for the best. This is always the risk when dealing with a third party which you have to trust to hold your funds and be legit. The chances that you'll be able to somehow contact regulators overseas to get them to act in your favour is very slim.

Since one of their partner exchanges is QuadrigaCX, and with the events that obviously unfolded in recent days regarding that exchange, I do wonder whether or not there is any link there between cryptocapital failing to process your withdrawal and potentially liquidity issues due to QuadrigaCX's own problems.

But still, none of this accounts for the fact that they still haven't provided any clear warning on their site that would suggest their fiat withdrawal systems are now dysfunctional - which is unacceptable.

I've learned a valuable lesson early on that you should never loan to gamblers.

The fact is that they generally don't follow what they promise, and since you're contacting them over an anonymous gambling site in the first place, you simply have no leverage when it comes to asking for repayment. If you are going to loan them, make sure that you do it with some form of collateral, which is extremely unlikely.

Just regarding one of the people on your list, Bitk0ynR2 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5103322.0), I certainly think that this whole "down payment before you can get a loan" is bogus. The fact that you have to somehow pay upfront for a loan is utterly ridiculous, and it seems like that he's literally just trying to scam a large upfront deposit when it comes by.

Good job and make sure you keep this list updated. Though I doubt you'll ever be able to refresh it as quickly as new scammers come into the scene. Also, this list seems to be solely based off people that play on BaB?

I feel like that you're missing the point here. It's not really as black and white as bitcoin vs banks. Banks are going to exist in the future regardless of whether bitcoin reaches mainstream adoption, and as a result, I don't think that the two are necessarily always in direct competition.

Yes, there will be instances where the interests of banks will be conflicting with the decentralisation and convenience that bitcoin offers, but it's extremely hard to see bitcoin "replacing" the traditional banking system soon.

Even if bitcoin does become the dominant global currency, it is imminent that there will still be demand for credit and savings that have to be conducted off chain. The third parties that conduct this will be banks, and I think that the likely scenario in that case would be that they would adopt their business models to simply accomodate for bitcoin as a unit of account, as opposed to fiat.