I used Polygon from time to time. Its primarily used as a L2 for Ethereum and it gained popularity when fees were high. From what I remember it has the lowest fees for transactions. I think you can send a regular transaction for less than a penny, so its great for making swaps or bridging.

The only issue is that it requires MATIC for gas. This is a problem if you have a new wallet and you only have ETH on it. Most other L2s all use ETH for this reason. Not all bridges can give you some spare MATIC gas to make your first swap. So you are left depending on a CEX to withdraw MATIC too.

But besides this small issue, its a great L2 like ARB and ZKSYNC.

Well you can buy bitcoin now and wait a few months years for it to double or go at least 50% or so. But since you are only investing $200, you won't make much money. If you want to make large sums of money there is really no other way but by investing in small cap projects. Most of them will go nowhere or go bust but if you pick the correct one you can easily 10x your investment.

The trick is you need to do research. Don't follow what is posted on the forum or twitter because it could be by shills. Just research many projects and what do you think will still exist 1 year from now or 5 years from now. There are alot of promising projects at the moment and you can invest in a couple and make a decent gain if it catches on.

I don't think either of my folks would want to invest in Bitcoin. However if they actually were interested I would persuade them to invest in the Bitcoin ETFs which were just launched. Sure its not keeping actual bitcoins in your self custody but with how old my folks are they would get scammed if they kept it on a Binance account. There are way too many fake emails, phishing links, etc that old people can easily get fooled and get their crypto stolen.

If you buy the Bitcoin ETFs you don't need to worry about it. Its on your brokerage account which is very secure and hackers don't generally target any online brokerages because everything is reversible and they can't really steal anything. This is one of the few ways why the Bitcoin ETFs are great for adoption because the elderly don't really understand self-custody but they can rely on the Bitcoin ETFs like Blackrock IBIT.

Yes satoshi and anyone who had coins on their wallet on Aug 2017, can access their Bch coins and sell them. Satoshi could sell all his BCH but by doing so it would create chaos because many BTC holders would be nervous that he might sell large amounts of his coins and cause market to crash.

There is speculation that he holds maybe a million or so bitcoins, this is a huge amount. So if he started to actually move any of those early coins, it would cause manic and many people would just sell their investment out of fear.

It’s best if they are never moved.

Another thing you need to realize is that the launch of the etf couldn’t of caused bearish activity because the AUM was pretty much nothing.

Even if some large whale wanted to short bitcoin, there would have to be AUM out so they can be lent out and shorted. There isn’t even options out yet for some whale to buy tons or puts to profit off bitcoin going down.

Like I said a few posts back, it was just a coincidence that it dumped on that day.

I am pretty sure it won’t be approved in May. There is way too much regulation in this area and the “What if ETH is a security “ keeps coming up.

I just don’t see them approving the etf in May; almost nobody expects it to be approved. I think eventually it will be approved but it’ll be like the bitcoin etf, where it took pretty much almost a decade from the first rejection to the first approval.

If you check those charts which shows old coins moving for the first time, it shows you that long term holders sell in one or two scenarios.

First one is when there is a huge crash. Usually some exchange hack or that Covid dump. If you look at those charts you can see some old holders got scared and took some profits.

Second time is when we make fresh new ATH. Whenever a new ATH is made there is always some old coins being sent on the blockchain for the first time. Usually they sell very early, such as in 2017, many sold at $3000 but we peaked at $20000.

It’s definitely lack of knowledge and not lack of capital. Especially when it comes to the crypto markets. You go to any futures exchange and you can have up to 100x leverage. So if you know what you are doing, even with $100 capital you can have $10,000 positions and you can easily double or triple your stack in a few trades. Lack of capital is not the problem.

It’s that people have no idea how to trade. It’s not easy. People have been doing it for decades and they still can’t make a profit. Especially if they want short term gains. Most of those gurus that you watch on YouTube, they just fake their videos and aren’t as successful as you think. Trading is extremely difficult and not for most people. 

Most people in North America live under a “debt is the American dream” and consider debt to be good. They don’t teach anything about debt in high school. And this is the reason why so many people become buried in debt as they age.

Look at how many people are paying over $1000 a month for a car loan, this is crazy. $1000 a month used to be a mortgage but now people are paying that much for depreciating assets with interest.

And it can easily spiral out of control and you can forget about saving anything when you are this deep in debt.

I think the only thing this is good for is transferring between exchanges. But the adoption for lightning is so low, I don’t see it being used heavily, at least for the time being.

Many people like me have moved on to ETH L2 networks such as ARB or Polygon. It’s cheap and fast and you can do large token swaps with little slippage and fees.

This should of been done 5 years ago or so and maybe the adoption would be higher than it is today.

They again can’t seem to get inflation under control. The CPI looked like it was stalling and would of achieved the 2% target but it’s been ticking up the last few months. They blame it on the cost of energy but we all know that is not the only factor.

And you got the government who can’t stop printing money. And you got the federal reserve which has to make the tough decision on whether to lower rates or not. Lower rates and inflation goes up or leave rates where they are since it’s not doing anything to combat inflation.

I think it’s more positive than negative.

You reach a larger audience when they can simply buy it on the stock exchange or they can call their broker and buy some bitcoins thru the etfs. Before you had to deal with CEX which was a pain and took too long to set up.

There is also more liquidity. So one large whale won’t be able to manipulate the market as before. There is going to be less volatility so no more days where bitcoin has 20% swings in price.

Negative is that there is more regulation. Which can be seen on how exchanges are strict with their users.

I am pretty sure for the majority of people who tried trading bitcoin, ended up with less than if they just held all together. Everyone wants to get rich quick but it’s not that easy.

Throughout the years I’ve seen many people lose their bitcoin stash because they either gambled it on some gambling site, they traded it for some alt that ended up going -99% or they leveraged traded and went bust.

So for those people, which is the majority they would of been better off just holding their bitcoins and not doing anything.

No incorrect. The native token on Arbitrium is ETH, which is used for gas on the ARB network. The token is used for other things but not to pay gas fees.

Most chains use ETH for gas, except Polygon which uses Matic.

The op just needs to withdraw some ETH from some exchange and use that to swap his ARB to ETH and then use that to buy BTC and by BTC I mean the wrapped WBTC since you can’t own BTC on any blockchain that isn’t bitcoin.

They will most likely approve the bitcoin options. There is already bitcoin options on the NYSE for that BITO etf which is the bitcoin futures etf. This exists for sure because I traded it in the past. And from what I remember almost nobody used it and the liquidity was awful but the options were at least available.

So I am pretty sure they will approve the options. It doesn’t make sense to list the etfs but no options where investors can hedge their exposure to bitcoin.

I could guess that most results will be no. Which might be a good thing, since everyone is bearish, it might mean we bottomed. Either way we broke $60K support which is not good. We are now retesting this strong resistance and hopefully we will engulf the area and close the weekly candle with a long wick. The weekend is almost here so there is only 1 more active trading day which is Friday.

Flows are bad for the etfs. They were negative for the past few days and yesterday we had like $500M in outflows and IBIT was negative for the first time. Seems people want to get out.

Leading into the FOMC both the stock market and crypto markets got a nice rally and then later on the market completely reversed.

It’s unfortunate that we broke the $60K area, this will act as resistance if we go to reclaim it. If we hold $60k then I can see how possibly making a new high in the next few months but if it rejects we might head to the $50K area pretty soon.

No I think it’s just a coincidence. The market rallied up until the etf launched and right after it started to dump. The market has been weak for many weeks and the $60K support was going to break one way or another.

The US etf dumped because people were expecting a sell the news event like the prior 3 events which led to market tops. The Bitcoin futures, Coinbase ipo and bitcoin futures etf launches. People just took profits because they knew it might of been a top,  but this time they were wrong.

No they aren’t created out of thin air, they are not synthetic shares. If someone buys like $1M worth of bitcoin, the etf then needs to buy those bitcoins thru their custody which is most likely coinbase and those $1M is taken out of circulation and held in trust by coinbase for blackrock.

Nothing is printed out of thin air here. They need to update their etf holdings everyday and you can see how much bitcoin they hold exactly. For the first 3 months or so the flows have been positive but lately they are flat or negative.

Yeah the US dollar is not that volatile but consider the Japanese yen. Go look at the chart and you will see crazy swings. Currently it’s at decade lows against the US dollar. This is obviously not good for trade business.

Who knows why it happened exactly, maybe it was the Bank of Japan fault for their policies or maybe it was due to Covid which created all this a few years back. Either way many are suffering because of this and the next few years currencies will be crazy volatile.