All I'm currently seeing is BTC forming a bull flag on 1D charts and that inverse head and shoulders is indicating that there might be a bull run hidden in the near future, be it through the Bakkt hype or the accumulation may become the reason for them to give it a shot once again upside before taking it down back for them to be able to make more and more BTC through shorting. It's good to see that 2020 will probably be the year Satoshi and we all have been waiting for, but I think that organic growth is much better than a straight pump.

The words I used in the subject above, have got a few more questions to ask:
- Are merits actually being circulated between those who really need it?
- Are they also helping out others through their sMerits?

There's a different sort of thinking I've come across - most people don't use their merits by not sharing them with those who deserve them.

Reason?!

Merits help others to rank up, mostly everyone here is just to earn a side income, and for most of them, it's a living if they are in a signature campaign. Just to stop others from being promoted to higher ranks so as to reduce competition and keep it low (with the fear of losing their own position in that campaign as few may not be confident enough of their capabilities of remaining in the same), they try their best not to share their merits ahead. But for your information, they're given only with the purpose to share on the basis of "Give & Take" tradition and keeping them to ourselves will be stupid and never be useful to us nor others. So, keep sharing merits and love to those users who really deserve those higher ranks we're at.

Merchants have still been using it, allowing it even before any legality and regulations were ever discussed before, that 10k BTC pizza was bought when nothing was being regulated.


The country you're talking about, is the country I live in. I believe that most people in our Government have got poops in their minds and based on their own stupid analogies, they're giving silly statements that BTC is ponzi, BTC is too volatile to be regulated, etc. Now, when they are seeing that too much money can be made through this investment (though risky, but still highly rewarding) and they can either put people in jail for various unreasonable reasons or take huge taxes over gains from this, they're now going to regulate these markets. Tell me, why the heck were they stopping everything (including banks) from dealing with crypto-related exchanges? And what's the guarantee that after taking a full hold of everyone's finances in crypto space, they won't stop everything once again and take back everything from us when BTC would once again be at its new peak?

There's just one simple statement for such articles:
"It doesn't really cost these news websites more than $50-100 (maybe $500 if too much reputed and a PR) to make their writers present such piquant and peppery articles which influence their subscribers to an extent that they don't even think before selling their diamond-like precious asset (BTC) for the price of peanuts."

The volume during December, 2017 was much less compared to the volume in December, 2018 and less volume took it very high but the only reason it went up was because everyone was interested in earning from it and the only way someone could earn through it was by buying low, selling high. After the launch of futures, many people involved themselves in the activity of shorting and earning more over people's speculations through the leveraged positions opportunity. Stops were getting hit hard but I saw that the accumulation was there as well, and so I believe that if this Bakkt hype could really turn the tables (and being very practical as well as realistic in my prediction), I see BTC crossing the super stable value of $6k which it held for a longer duration, and then, after breaking that level, it'll break at least the most hyped price of 2017, i.e.; $10,000. Whatever comes above will be a bonus, but this is the least I see if everything goes right and regulations don't stop us from using our rights.

I hope that this thread may have helped few of you to save a lot when BTC was playing steady between the range of $6k-$7.5k. Now, I'm predicting back that we are heading towards a new low before we see this bird fly once again. I'm seeing BTC to go at least $2900 before it starts recovering at a full pace, just the way we saw during December 2017. Let's get our fingers crossed and the stable growth of BTC and I wish you all great success in this new year.

Manipulation by whom, traders? I believe they've not even entered yet in the markets through exchanges but surely getting OTC trades conducted. If we speak about the intervention of Governments, I believe that the real manipulation will be seen once they approve Bakkt's launch which is getting delayed each month under the name of some extra features being added for the time being. But I believe that the actual reason is the US government and it's clearly been said that they're dealing with the regulations part. Bakkt had been all the way in talks since August 2018 and it's still pending its official launch, tell me what's going on? 

Please decide a slab where everything is clarified, like users with how many merits shouldn't participate (or I believe you shouldn't allow high level members only at the first place as many of them have already earned enough merits and only those who are now down from their membership ranks should be allowed to participate.

As well, I'm now adding a few of my own threads' links here to give a few extra tips on earning merits, hope that'll help:
- Worried about Merits? I'm here to help.
- Do's and Don'ts to get merits - Read carefully!
- Interesting debate between an Avg Joe and Legend over how was life before Merits
- A query regarding Merits specifically.
- Fear about merits.

And below are the threads discussing over spam and ban to give an idea to newbies what they shouldn't do:
- What to do about spam in Forum Sections?
- Important discussion over BAN. Newbies must read.

Hope all these links will be helpful for newbies and mid-level members to learn more about what they should take care of when making posts and about earning merits.

I guess it's not bad if someone adds a trust rating in your profile if you serve them with your skills as you've mentioned in OP, but the way gentlemand said, you only need to post in the right thread at right time and merit/s will be yours. Your intentions shouldn't really be earning merits, but rather helping out newbies like you here with contributing messages gives no reason to anyone for not giving them to you. Asking/saying about trading merits would be as stupid as striking a hammer on your head knowingly that only you are going to get harmed. Be reasonable, be quality-persistent and find some threads like one opened by Pmalek where you can post your eligible posts if you find any potential in yourself and have the confidence to get a merit and go Jr. Member. It's a challenge, so take it the way it should be taken.

You're doing a great work, man!
As I've been busy myself posting here and trying to help out people, I give you the privilege of choosing 15 more newbies and helping them out turn into Jr. Member, which is why I've merited OP with 15 merits. Please do your best and choose wisely, as well I would suggest you to please make a table in OP and give details about the user/s you merited as well as which post did you merit. It'll help other newbies to check those guys' posts and learn the way how it is earned. Glad to see everyone's trying to help, but regrets for newbies who don't even check for such opportunities and just pop up with a thread begging about merits and/or their rank being negotiated down to newbie level.

I believe it's not too hard to reach Jr. Member here as everyone said that you only need 1 merit for that to happen. And if earning even 1 merit is not possible for you, then buying Copper membership for just BTC0.00208333 (merely $8 to get the convenience back and you'll be alright again).

P.S.: I've checked all your previous posts and all of them were in gambling threads of your local sub-forum area (Hindi language). I'm not against the language you're working with, but I found none of your posts to be deserving a single merit due to which you're now here asking about your rank.

2 advices:
- Please try to find some better threads to post as I found that most of your posts were in a single local thread. Try to interact at different places, and talk on-topic rather than going for off-topic threads.
- Please improve your English a bit to be able to make us understand what you wish to say, a bit more clearly.

Yep, correct, absolutely correct point, noted!
But then, it was all just hyped up too much that futures will break all the barriers and bring in huge amount of investors in order to put their money in crypto and drive it crazy. Did they do exactly what we expected? No. They sent the markets all the way down to the levels we never thought we'd see, except why we were expecting BTC to end up above $50k last year (2018), right?
Futures gave the ability to short, and that's the truth! You can check the volume for 2017 end, and it was considerably lower, but BTC was growing and there's a possibility we could have reached our expected levels without Futures' launches. You can check 2018's volumes, when Futures were launched, slowly and steadily BTC and other alts started to die actually but the volumes almost sextupled in terms of daily trading. It's really not good when volume is too much but instead of appreciation (yes, I understand that BTC went too high too quickly, but even after the correction, I believe it should have remained steady to ~6-7k range), we only witnessed regression of the whole crypto space.

I understand the fact you're trying to explain here, but if we assume based on the dump itself, there must have been a lot of demand from the 20k level till the current 3-4k level range because if it wasn't there, then BTC would have gone straight down to 0 and the value would have ended in grave if and only if there wasn't the demand you're talking about.


You're correct at one stance that when the demand goes down (esp. for the major crypto like BTC, the whole market including alts and tokens as well as ICOs will see a downfall due to the parent crypto falling to the ground levels). But we're talking about regulations here, and with them, I don't really see average people getting any good profits (considering BTC an asset) when everything will go in the hands of Governments and the so-called institutional investors will surely take charge and throw crypto at such a value where such average investors like us won't be able to buy even 0.01 BTC. They are currently playing with the markets making us helpless to sell almost all our stock to them and this is their biggest win, after which they'll start to take the value up because currently, it's the accumulation phase. Come on! BTC has now come in their eyes and it's not a big deal for them to take control.

If you're saying that crypto should be considered as a legal tender and be allowed to hold the name of a currency, then that's not possible due to it's highly volatile nature and uncertain pumps and dumps.


Merchants are already accepting crypto through various different ways and the only fear for those not accepting it is its volatility, the fear of getting dumped. Regulations with futures are making it possible for big dogs to short it and steal away the remaining BTC in smaller wallets to be added to their huge-sized wallets, this makes them more and more powerful and the one and only thing - cryptocurrencies - which can be bought/sold/traded pseudonymously (even anonymously in some cases) over few centralized as well as decentralized exchanges, will then get into the hands of these bigger authorities who will never let us make the correct use of our rights once again.

I'm very glad that you replied back, I'll definitely check it through PC (thought I could see it in my mobile as well through "Desktop site" mode but it's still blurry). Congratulations once again, and this time from the depth if my heart. It's great that when most people we're complaining and regretting about their investments in crypto, you took a unique step by "gambling" your BTC and making almost 100 times in just 1 day, tough luck you've got, man! Hats off. And yeah, no more burden from my end, you can definitely keep your bet IDs and userID anonymous as it's your right and that's why Bitcoin is here.

We, we, we!
We're being super-foolish into believing that regulations will actually add some extra value to the crypto space, well you'd now ask "Why?"

Hey, but regulations are good, eh? Why the heck are you so much burnt in your ass that you're talking like this about Governments?
We've been brought down with the purpose of getting our "one and only pseudonymous asset" being sold to (literally stolen away by) these Governments who're showing a lollipop to us in the name of regulations because they want to have a hold on us by knowing who holds how much in their portfolio and send them to jail whenever they want to, for any fucking reason.

But, but, regulations are going to move the price up, you know Bakkt?
Yeah, that institutional platform by parent company ICE (Intercontinental exchange) of NYSE, so-called Bakkt. You know something? Why the hell are they delaying their launch? People are so optimistic about the launch of this super-platform (yeah, I call it that because it's not just an ordinary exchange) but the reason why it's not coming up are the regulations that are stopping it. So, when their Government is not even allowing a platform to launch their services, do you really believe their regulations and the mix of old traditional banking system and crypto will make it up to something positive happenings in the future? Well, I don't think so, because then they can either stop it at any single place or if they ever decide to just shut down everything, nobody in the world can do anything as we're the ones who took interest in getting everything ^regulated^ and think that it would increase the value of BTC. Don't you think that without the intervention of these so-called regulated firms which allow institutional investors to short BTC, BTC and all the alts were doing much better and BTC would have already crossed the 30k, maybe 40-50k levels?


P.S.: It's my personal opinion and can't say about others, but think at least a hundred times and then decide, whether we really need this or are we going to be bound by their so-called rules once everything gets into their hands? We'll be nothing more than their sockpuppets and they will leave us with nothing but regrets.

Me, and everyone here is waiting for this Bakkt platform to show up and let the institutional investors get started by letting them play with the values by longing/shorting BTC with huge contract sizes of approx. 25 BTC. But when we say that it could affect the values too much, what is the base of saying that? Couldn't everything prove negative just the way it did when we expected something different through Bitmex and CBOE futures but a lot more different things happened and we're here at sub-4k? When we speak that Bakkt could move the price of BTC and alts to boom alone, then why didn't it happen before itself? Why are we currently standing at 3.6-4k levels with the fear of getting dumped down to less than 2k by those institutional investors who're currently making lots of BTC through their shorting techniques?

People are asking some nonsensical questions here, but I've got some better ones for you. Can you please share betslip of an upcoming/live Tennis game or Parlay bets if that's what you've mastered upon)? I hope this won't bother you as you're going to give everything for free based on what you wrote in OP - you're going to ask for nothing upfront or infront whatever.


Super-reasonable reply, eh!    

Good to see you've ended your year with such a big partying win (although, I somehow believe it's photoshopped as the image was not so clear ) and I wish you luck and success in all your bets ahead as well. Had not been gambling since last year as I was out of funds, but after watching your win, I've got my confidence back and will go for Parlay bets in order to win something big like you. Great going, congrats! As this Parlay bet is from nitrogensports, would you mind sharing your betslip instead of this ^photoshopped^ image?

I liked the way the author used to describe Bitcoins in his words, but it looked more speculative rather than what Bitcoin actually is. I know I'm comparing apples with oranges here as it was clearly written over there that the definition will not be technical but rather a user-friendly statement which could easily get investors' attention towards it, but going all the way speculative and trying to compare Bitcoin to stocks isn't going to make a better image of crypto space in the minds of new investors. All in all, a better website and something new I saw today and learnt.

For those who're not aware of one more fact, mods/admins can also see the email address of the person who reports a post of anyone.

@OP, if you believe that there's some sort of spamming / threat / extortion / unkind behavior, you can use that "Report" button in order to use your right to contribute to the forum in a much better way by letting mods/admins know about the inappropriateness of that comment and help keep the forum clean.