Good news hasn't been much of a stimulating factor, which we can contribute to the bear market nulliying everything that's bullish. On top of that, when you read news articles, you are mostly reading pure bs, and more importantly, when the news is out, you are mostly too late to react.

Regarding Bakkt and the SEC, people shouldn't focus on that. We know that the SEC isn't keen on anything related to Bitcoin for now, and probably won't be for the rest of the year.

I don't see how news has anything to do with this? While the price was tanking to low $80's last year, it was already known that it would fork in January.

Good luck to everyone trying to buy all Bitcoin's in existence. You can't do something like that without people quickly noticing, and when people do start to notice that whatever entity or entities are buying in big, they simply won't let go of their coins. On top of that, you don't gain much by trying to buy all coins in existence since there is no way to stake them or vote with them.

The only thing you do is make everyone even wealthier on paper, and miners extremely happy. Sounds like a bad deal for governments who only want you to become poorer and poorer.

2017 was a bit of an exaggeration, where it wasn't just more transactions taking place inflating the fees, but the BCash fork contributed to most of it. Miners moving back and forth insane amounts of hashrate significantly slowed down Bitcoin's block times, which we have seen slow down to over 17 minutes per block instead of the 10 minutes it usually hovers around. If that wasn't enough, their spam attack made the situation only worse.

I'm certain that under 'normal' circumstances the hype usage of 2017 would still cause the fees to increase, but it wouldn't be even remotely as bad as it actually was. Did you notice that now these idiots have forked off we haven't seen one single spam attack of serious nature? I'm glad that they have their own toy to play with right now. Best thing that ever happened to Bitcoin.

Maybe people have to stop pretending that mining in general is so interesting because it allows them to generate passive income. 

The market has taken such a dip, that it makes way more sense to buy into Bitcoin than having to wait for your payments through cloud mining that may or may not come because scam sites pretend that they aren't profitable. It also doesn't make sense to build your own mining rig. Buy Bitcoin directly. That makes sense. Buying Bitcoin directly has always outperformed mining, and that by orders of magnitude.

By the time the price has gone up a lot all people mining are still in process of breaking even, lol.

TA definitely loses some of its utility in times where panic has the upper hand, but when a market calms down and things are moving based on how bots calculate their next move without being interrupted by idiots panic selling, it's a whole lot easier to wait for confirmations and act based on that.

Fundamental analysis is something that works if you have a very long time horizon, but doesn't apply to the short term picture of a market, especially when it comes to something as speculative crypto. If you buy Bitcoin in for the long term, just buy because the fundamentals are rock solid, but practice caution if you have a seperate stash of funds that you allocate to trading.

Whatever you end up doing, make sure you don't fall for so called experts/gurus selling signals and whatnot. I know that most people don't care anyway, but if even one of them is saved the disappointment of losing money due to these clowns, it's already worth it.

I'm not sure if there is much left in the price that will move based on what happens with Bakkt in the forthcoming months. I'm more inclined to think that we're in for a longer term sideways movement, basically like what happened back in 2015 where we were hovering under $300 for months straight.

In the end, the price jumping under/above $4000 isn't all that bad if you take into consideration that we came from below $1000 back in 2017. It makes you have more respect for the current prices, because this looks more like healthy growth than anything above $10,000 which isn't possible to maintain at current stage. It's time for Bitcoin's fundamentals to improve, and that's happening as we speak.

Also keep in mind that the first quarter is usually a poor time frame for Bitcoin, so don't expect anything of significance.

I doubt it. Japan's ETF market hovers below $400 billion while the US ETF market is just shy of a being a $4 trillion market, which also explains why people are so desperately eager to see the VanEck ETF get an approval. There is no comparison. The SEC is in a league of its own, and it will ignore everything else till it thinks there is reason to allow an ETF to come through.

If even 1% of that capital flows into the VanEck ETF, it's ~$40 billion right there. I can see why the US isn't keen on approving this ETF. Heck, even 0.1% = ~$4 billion would be a great achievement already.

The SEC has a tough decision to make. Open the flood gates or not.

How does it make a lot of hash power redundant? Miners will always bank on the on-chain transaction fees, plus the transaction fees they generate from merge mining side chains, which is something that will become more and more of a dominant aspect in the forthcoming years.

In the end, I strongly believe that miners will make sure they run on energy they generate themselves rather than buying it in bulk from whatever energy supplier. In other words, the energy cost will continue to shrink per miner, which is something that's already happening to a certain degree. It's how markets work, every participant will do everything possible to make sure that operational cost shrinks and profit margins grow.

Yobit is a shitcoin exchange, but one with pretty solid traffic statistics, and they charge only 0.10BTC = $400 to have your coin listed.

If you think about that, why would anyone pay $1200 for an exchange with no volume, track record, etc? Most people here have a Yobit account as well, so there is way more to gain for any project to use Yobit rather than your site. Yobit also happens to do occasional pumps on random coins, so even more to think about. 

I don't see that happening. It's close to impossible to happen actually, especially if you look back at how we're working on ways to scale off-chain rather than on-chain.

In the long run, miners will also be scooping up the fees generated through Bitcoin's side chains that they merge mine, so if the activity on these side chains explodes due to all the garbage that runs on top of them, miners will automatically benefit from that. In other words, there is no real need to worry about miners or the security of the network.

And who knows, miners might want to provide liquidity to the Lightning Network as well to generate more fee income.

If we have the market globally increase (which is what happens when Bitcoin goes up) and people gain back their confidence, won't that automatically result in the rookies of this world to become even more greedy? I think so. People become overly bearish when the price tanks, and overly bullish when the price pumps.

We'll get that spark eventually, but there is a lot of selling pressure to get rid of, which is what makes me believe that if we head higher, it will be a slower form of growth. People have had all the time in the world to buy their coins around current levels, and they look to sell it when we go up 10, 20, 30, per cent. Good news for those who look to accumulate coins over a longer period of time.

It's like a cat and mouse game. Eventually governments will try to meet the average user in the middle, all to make local transactions less appealing, and thus not miss out on tax income they otherwise wouldn't be getting. It's amazing that crypto offers people this much power, because for the first time it's up to the government to make a 'friendly' move towards its people.

If you keep thinking that people will blindly follow everything you as government come up with, you are wrong. I would like this to be turned into some sort of a revolution at one point, whenever Bitcoin is ready to handle mass adoption. People gave governments the power they have, and now they have the tool they need to lessen that power, so use it.

Good riddance I say.

If you can't handle this market, you don't belong here, it's that simple. Noobs get crushed hard and this will continue to happen because they don't know what they invest in, and don't know how this market works. I dare to say that the majority of the noobs who are joining crypto haven't ever had any sort of prior market experience, be it with stocks, bonds, etc.

Crypto is so easily accessible, that you can buy into it basically at any age if there aren't age related restrictions where you have to be at least 18 years of age. But even at an age of 18 you very likely don't have any market experience to at least put things into perspective and figure out the very basics of when markets looks overbought or not.

My first experience with stocks, far before Bitcoin existed, was to buy everything that has been dumped to the ground. Obviously, it's not a perfect metric to solely focus on, but you get the idea.

I'm glad there are more of them nowadays, because these exchanges are the ones that provide a decent level of customer support. The exchanges that don't care and accept deposits right away always end up dealing with a lot of complaints from angry customers spamming their support desks. I'm certain that more than half of the complaints is related to KYC/AML (i.e. people not being able do cash out or frozen accounts).

On the other hand, people should know better by now. At one point every centralized exchange will ask you to verify yourself one way or another, so don't assume your exchange will grant you unverified withdrawals for ever.

It's very unlikely that something like this will happen with Bitcoin just for the sake of double spending, and there isn't enough hashrate available to set up such an attack. Miners, regardless of how much we dislike them, will do everything they can to keep the main network operating as healthy as possible.

There is more money to be made over a longer period of time by running normally, than to attempt a double spend, which will likely fail anyway.

On top of that, the 'hashwar' that we have seen between ABC and SV also shows how pools are ready to protect a network by pooling their resources together and keep malicious entities outside. It will happen with Bitcoin as well, which means that an attack from whatever unknown entity is even less likely.

Most likely.

It's very difficult for such a large entity to start accumulating Bitcoin with how widely distributed the coins are. It's impossible to pump a few billion $ into Bitcoin without having it be a process that would take a year or two at the very minimum. I'm certain that they would do everything they could to make it look like it's not a government buying in, which requires proxies, funding them in a manner that doesn't pop eyes, more time, etc.

There are only like 5 million coins that are floating around, and there is a constant flow of demand that rises with every price increase we go through. Good luck trying. 

Tone is an idiot. I do agree with some of his points (mainly when it comes to decentralization), but reject the rest of it, even how he thinks about certain altcoins. He's expecting them to die off, but yet doesn't have the balls to short them. It's pure mouth, little action, and he rides the flow of the market hard.

The thing that annoys me is his arrogance, and then mainly regarding how he blatantly assumes that things will happen just because he thinks so.

I tried watching some of his recent videos, and he's still doing a lot of;

Aaaah, yeah, but aaaahh.
Bitcoin will see lower lowes because aaahh, yeah, and aaaah.
I think that altcoins will aaah, in the long aaah, term lose their value aaaaah.

Wtf? Is he ok?

Why a retest of $3000? Why can't it just be moving sideways for a longer while without going down too much?

It seems that a lot of people are waiting and expecting $3000 to be tested, which boosts my confidence even further that it probably won't happen. Not saying that there is no chance that it will not happen, just less likely with how it offers a great counter move.

We have been setting lower highs for a while now, but at the same time also higher lows, so I would say that the next move is a matter of flipping a coin. It could go either way if we see a significant move.

Where do they claim that Nasdaq is their business partner?

Obviously, it's not. The only connection in the future there will be between Nasdaq and this platform, is a connection in form of a legal battle to have it be shut down and the owners/operators arrested. If there is one country you don't want to mess with, then it for sure is the US. They severely overestimate themselves, but underestimate the capabilities of the authorities.

The funny part is that it won't just be US stocks, soon there will be stocks listed from plenty of countries at the same time, which means that they only keep adding more 'enemies' to their list that wants them offline. It's a kamikaze mission.

I honestly don't see it be a threat to the financial system either. Bitcoin will only become a threat if it challenges the US dollar, and this isn't something I see happening, or at least, not any time soon.

In the end, the main point governments and banks focus on is to have the ecosystem around Bitcoin become a regulated environment rather than something they either ban or selectively attack. Bans and attacks result in economical activities to shift to other countries, or even go underground, which is the last thing you as government want to see happen. You can better have that control than to let it go, and governments start to realize that.

Crypto is power to everyone that wants and needs it, regardless of what their government thinks is good or bad.