I think it's more of a smart marketing move than something done to actually benefit the students. I'm not saying something is wrong with that, but we have to acknowledge that there are certain financial incentives.

Most of the interested students have crypto already, but lack fiat. It only makes sense to have Bitcoin be a payment option because it significantly lowers the bar, plus it allows people to legally avoid taxation by not cashing out to fiat.

Overall, these cases add to Bitcoin's legitimacy, and I can only be happy with that. From fraud and scheme to something that may change the world, I'll take that at any time of the day. 

Italy's economy is orders of magnitudes bigger than Greece, but I somehow do believe that everything will be done to not let that country implode. It would drag the whole EU and likely even the world with it to some degree.

Don't forget Italy imploding will also give Deutsche bank the final push it needs to implode, and with how they have nested themselves in so many corners of the world, it's impossible that they won't trigger a major global crisis.

All the money that went to Greece is gone for ever. The EU tries to convince average joes that every penny will be paid back, but every person with common sense knows that it is nonsense. The same applies to Italy. It's an endless put.

I don't think he was aware of what the consequences of his actions were, because if he did, he would refrain from pulling off something so stupid. It's largely pure ignorance combined with a tint of arrogance.

Some people really believe they found ways to remain unnoticed while doing illegal things, and it time on time again proves that you can't remain unnoticed for a long period of time, especially not when it comes to mining.

The peaks in energy consumption can be measured quite easily, and in case of weird usage patterns you can expect a visit from both the police and the company providing you your energy.

It might take years before the main currencies (referring to Bitcoin and Ethereum) properly scale, which leads me to believe that we shouldn't hope for anything similar to what happened last year on the way up.

Bitcoin hasn't seen much of an actual on-chain throughput improvement with SegWit being partly adopted, and Ethereum isn't even remotely close to have some kind of scaling solution be ready to roll out publicly.

I get it that people want to see the price increase today rather than tomorrow, but what's the point if we yet again are reminded of how easy it is to cripple this ecosystem as a whole? I'm certainly not in for that.

Vaneck ETF needs approval too and it still affected the market, and that while the SEC has never really been signalling willingness to let it go through. People finally accepted it's not worth reacting to anymore.

CFTC on the other hand has already approved a financial instrument tied to Bitcoin, and for that reason is more likely to accept that what Bakkt offers, but the market doesn't seem to give a shizzle about it at all.

The overall mood is to ignore everything that's bullish because it won't be able to lift the price out of its current range for long. It's definitely bad timing to launch anything related to crypto this year.

Regulators are positioned to watch over what banks do and if they conduct fair business or not, but it's not happening, or at least not frequent enough, which is what the main problem is.

On the other hand, do regulators really want to watch over banks? It's far more profitable for governments to have banks mess up badly, where they are later massively fined for their illicit activities. I think this is actually the case.

Banks see it as a game they some times lose but mostly win. It's the same with trading actually, as long as you settle more winning than losing trades you are doing well. The fines they occasionally cough up is collateral damage.

The problem with these smaller exchanges is that we never know what actually happened, especially with how the rookie operators can easily be tempted to take a run with people's money and blame it on hackers.

Not surprised at all by how they use default whois protection for their domain. Ultimately you could attempt to report that domain to Godaddy, but they likely used fake details to register their account. 

Is anyone here able to open their main exchange site? It's not opening here at all unfortunately. It might turn out to be deleted as well, which would be a stab in the back for sure and a sign of their guilt.

Platforms as BitMEX are frustrated with how the market is lacking volatility, and I like that. It's actual use that can develop right now. Isn't it amazing that the $100 you received months ago is still roughly worth the same? That's money.

People don't realize how much of an accumulation opportunity they are being offered right now. Even if the price drops a bit from where it is right now, you can use that to lower your previous entry points even further.

If you believe what you invest in, don't let the market sentiment bother you too much. I remember how I last year during the bull run wish I bought more before it started to break through ATH after ATH, and that's what I'm doing now.

Institutions are probably just as afraid of you fellow Bitcoiners with how easily people tend to mood-switch based on the most recent price activity. It's really a gamble for them instead of a well thought out investment.

Overall, there is no reason to be afraid of manipulation. As mentioned by members above, it's already happening and it very likely has been happening since the very beginning of Bitcoin being tradable on exchanges.

People want institutions to pump this market way past the moon, but aren't looking forward to have them be involved in this market. It's contracting in every possible way. Just let it happen, there isn't much you can do against it anyway.

If you look at what happened in countries that prohibited certain forms of crypto use, you'll see that the local markets have exploded directly after that. That's what I consider to be a sign of strength.

If people didn't bother to shift to the local markets, it would signal to the governments that prohibiting the use of crypto actually works, which I'm glad to say that it doesn't, or at least not entirely.

The more governments start work against crypto, the more they start to piss off regular folks. People shifting to local markets means a loss of power for governments trying to dictate every aspect of their markets.

The best way to deal with crypto from the side of the government is to fairly regulate it, which means that people have way less incentive to even use local markets. I'm sure they'll come to that conclusion eventually.

I have never felt comfortable shorting a market going through bullish momentum, and definitely don't feel comfortable shorting the stock market right now, even with how insane US stock valuations are.

Current stock dip could very well turn out to be THE dip to accumulate more before the price rushes up further. The fact that there is so much money in circulation doesn't make it very likely that we'll correct far beyond what we have seen lately.

As always, time will tell who the smart money is, shorters or longers. I wouldn't put my money on either of those sides. This for a neutral investor is the time to sit back and not do anything. Keep your money in your pocket.

Oh, they have found that out for sure by now. Currently these people think of the bear market as being a negative event, but this bear market turns people into firm hodlers of the future.

Let's be honest here, most of the older members here went through a similar stage at the very beginning. We learn as we go through bull runs and bear markets, and so will those who joined last year on the way up.

Stage 1 (hodling through a bear market) can be seen as completed. Stage 2 of becoming a firm hodler is to hodl through bull runs without selling the majority of your coins, which for some people might be harder to do.

Being an all-around hodler ain't easy.

I think it's more "good news" for people here than for people in China. We have been reading about China bans this or that form of use all the time, but never knew the actual extent of these bans.

Maybe in some cases there hasn't been an actual ban at all. China has always been a major source of where Bitcoin's demand comes from, while most people here think China is no longer relevant in this industry.

China is an immense country in terms of their population count. If even 1-2% (in reality it's likely much higher) there has still some level of involvement here, that's up to 25 million users. How is that not relevant?

It's not mainstream joe ready yet, which explains why the network as it is right now is small and cumbersome to use due to the lack of reliable clients. Funds are at risk and for that reason I'm happy they don't jump on board yet.

By the time Coinbase and the likes of it start to adopt LN, you can be sure that there will be a massive adoption boost taking place. The interesting part is how the big block camp will react to a fully deployed LN.

They can continue to block SegWit as much as they want, but when they do the same with LN they put themselves in such a losing position, that it will actually starts to hurt their core business.

I can see where your frustration comes from, but he's not necessarily marking them all as a scam. Top tier exchanges (especially nowadays) avoid smaller coins that don't tend to solve a problem.

These coins end up being listed on shitty (smaller) exchanges with mostly anonymous owners who don't think it's necessary to comply with regulations and all other requirements nowadays.

The only thing is that when a certain coin (regardless of how good their intentions are) gets itself listed on a shitty exchange, this event directly dents its overall credibility because serious investors tend to avoid them.

I'm glad that we will never head into that direction with how there is enough room for a wide variety of currencies to emerge and all occupy their share of the so called 'money market'.

Institutions don't really care much about Bitcoin itself, so they are more than happy to continue trading convenient financial instruments with cash settlements. As long as they can buy Bitcoin's exposure it's enough already.

Eventually options and futures markets will dominate Bitcoin too, so it's only a matter of time. Let them have their cash settled instruments and we continue to actually own what we think we own.

Many small donations out of goodwill translates into an amount he can comfortably sustain himself with. I don't even think he has to ask for anything with how people will dust-spam his addresses automatically.

I have occasionally sent coins to certain (active) addresses just to clean up my own private keys so that the funds will remain in circulation. I don't ever delete private keys with funds in them.

I might regret it at some point in the future when even satoshis become valuable, but at least I made someone else 'happy' with it. Maybe I should create my own 'dust' wallet and save up everything year after year.

Bitcoin is never difficult to obtain with how divisible it is, and this is exactly why the price doesn't matter in terms of actual usage as currency. Stability is the key element supporting it.

In the stock market you quite often see splits happening when share prices are too difficult to buy into for average joes with some stocks reaching $1000 per unit. In this case it would be well justified to talk about hard to obtain.

There were rumors that Amazon's stock could turn out to be a split candidate with how it touched $2000 not that long ago. Not sure if it's going to happen, but it wouldn't surprise me at all.

Novogratz has way more credits within the crypto space than McAfee, which by now has done everything he could to make people think he's an idiot. He should stick to the security side and calling exchanges out for being scams.

Ver is a permabull by default. Even if the end of the world is near he'll keep praising how much merchant adoption there is for Bcash, while in reality Litecoin has more on-chain transaction activity with orders of magnitude less merchant adoption.

Where are the descending triangle dudes? Where is the breakout they have been talking about? The market doesn't seem to give a shizzle about triangles. We'll keep seeing the market hover between $6000-$6800 for months.

Trading bots aren't passive income sources. It's really gambling that you are doing because you can only hope that your bot will end up cashing out more profitable than losing trades.

If trading bots were even remotely usable as passive income source as people think (some times even blindly assume) they are, don't you think we all would be running them by now? It just doesn't make much sense.

And then I haven't even started talking about how important it is to have a bot be coded from the ground up to fit your requirements. Bots people buy from one of the many sellers are mass produced and a target.

If you as seller know how your bots think and behave, you can exploit them or even sell that information to market makers.