In my experience they don't leave coins in depositing addresses for long. They usually sweep them up daily and transfer them to one of their cold wallet addresses.

Lots of investors got badly burned by the ICO craze in 2018, and are staying clear of the altcoin market.

In my opinion a lot of alts need to get sent to the altcoin graveyard and the community needs to concentrate on getting about ten alts onto every single exchange on earth to ensure sufficient liquidty for them.

If you are trading bitcoin or litecoin against euros, then Kraken is definitely the best because their euro markets are liquid.

On Coinbase (and other exchanges) you can wait ages for your order to get filled, because there isn't much liquidity in any of their euro pairs.

On the other hand if you are trading against dollars, Coinbase is best.

So - the answer to your question is, "It depends on which trading pair you concentrate on".

I am not sure why you are surprised.

India still has capital controls as it tries to prevent money leaving the country. And cryptocurrency is a way for money to leave the country.

So baby steps - first lobby for the end of capital controls, and then you can lobby for the restrictions on cryptocurrency to be lifted.

If your USD wallet was emtied - either the dollars were withdrawn to a bank account that is not yours, or used to buy coins which then got transferred. Which is it?

I find it hard to believe the dollars were withdrawn to another bank account. Coinbase is pretty hot on ensuring the IDs on their wallets match the IDs on the linked bank accounts.

It's likely not a whale but an exchange consolidating it's accounts. If they have a lot of dust they will move it to consolidate it into fewer addresses.

Most bitcoins are held at the major exchanges rather than in whales wallets.

It depends on whether the thefts have been reported to the police. If they have been reported, and the police are able to prove in a court that the coins were stolen, then the courts can order the coins to be returned.

But it all needs to happen by the book.

They won't include him.

Bitcoin and the blockchain method of avoiding double-spending on the internet are great innovations to be sure. But they haven't yet affected the real economy because people are using it for speculation only. Whereas previous innovations like the internet and world wide web really did change the real economy, as did the invention of the telephone and car.

It depends on how easy it is to withdraw Swiss Francs.

For example, though Kraken allows you to trade bitcoin against the British pound, it's eye-wateringly expensive to withdraw pounds. Which means Brits don't bother to trade bitcoin against the pound, but instead trade against euros and use sepa to withdraw those euros to a british bank account (the bank changes them into pounds).

It's the withdrawal facilities that are weak in most exchanges.

Hah! Famous last words.

Coinbase says they are safe, and they probably believe that. But all the exchanges believe they're safe till someone manages to break through. They just need one super-smart hacker to do it.

The whole point of decentralised cryptocurrency is that there isn't a single point of failure that can wreck the whole project. By centralising coins in an exchange like Coinbase, you bring the single point of failure back into play. Maybe we can trust coinbase, but what if we can't?

They're in this space because they want to "get rch quick" and they think cryptocurrency is the way to do this. In the late 1990's the same type of mentality were trading stocks on the NASDAQ.

What's going on is the same thing that has been going on since the beginning. Don't keep your coins in exchanges, don't trust them to other people. Be your own bank.

The trouble is that a lot of automated keyword trading buys and sells when they see the words "China bans..." or "China approves..."

And as long as ordinary traders follow the same signals, it will keep on happening.

It would be funny if Canada developed into a cryptocurrency centre, drawing money away from Wall Street!

It's an accidental result of him choosing ten minute blocks and 50 bitcoins per block initially, halving every four years.

If he'd chosen 100 bitcoins per block and five minute blocks, it would have changed the end amount of bitcoins generated.

As to why he chose 50 bitcoins per block - I think he thought it was a nice number, if you start with 100 bitcoins per block you reward the early miners too much.

I'm surprised they didn't find other partners like Skrill for example. It's really sad seeing these pioneer companies fail. Without their efforts and services bitcoin wouldn't have got to where it is today.

He should - but the problem is the cover. How are they going to depict Satoshi when they don't know if he is a single person or a group of persons and no-one even knows if any of them are still alive as the coins mined by Satoshi have never moved.

If those coins start moving, there will be an earthquake in the bitcoin eco-system.

The trade war IS affecting the world economy - it's hurting China and all the countries that supply raw materials and parts to them (so Korea, Japan, Australia etc are all experiencing downturns).

However, I agree with you that this doesn't have an impact on bitcoin. What has an impact is that rich Chinese don't trust Xi jingping and are trying to get their money out of China anyway they can. They used to do it via real estate - China allowed you to take $50,000 out of the country every year, so they bought a property in Canada or Australia using a mortgage, and then sent currency out of china each year to pay teh mortgage. After 25 years you have sent quite a bit of money abroad and have also gained an asset that has appreciated in a safe country. But China has cracked down on that, so people are turning to bitcoin.

Yes. And Kim Yong Un has totally understood the benefits of cryptocurrency to dictatorships.

Most of those ransom malware viruses which demand bitcoin are from North Korea, and it's state sponsored malware designed to get them bitcoin which they then exchange for dollars on various exchanges using proxies.

Everyone is focused on the price because it's so volatile. Losing 20% of value in a month makes people nervous (normal currencies barely move 2% in a month). Until this volatity stops, bitcoin will continue to be a fringe asset rather than a mainstream currency.