No one knows what will happen right now. I wouldn't mind having it be put to the test if it is happening anyway. US stocks are still heavily overpriced in most cases, so there is way more air that needs to find a way out, and it will take a year or two to find out where we stand in terms of valuations. It went up for a decade, and the correction/crash that follows similarly will take some time to find a bottom.

The very fact that Gold keeps increasing just tells me that capital is positioning itself in that asset out of fear, and there is no reason to expect it to stop increasing any time soon.

Nothing I'm afraid, because if they did before buying into the hype, they would have waited on the side for the price to fall down to enter.

In the same way, all the idiots calling themselves experts made the same mistake, so it's not that newbies are the only ones to blame for doing the wrong thing. Newbies, ok, that's pretty understandable if they burn themselves in the very beginning, because we have all been there at one point, but the very fact that people who know something about traditional markets and their cycles have done the same, is ridiculous, heck, retarded.

Fomo affects everyone, because the euphoria that flows through the market turns even the most conservative investors into yolo gamblers. No one wants to miss out. The feeling that you could have invested but didn't is killing, just like how some people right now think about how they could have sold last year but didn't.

News outlets have been fooling people here into thinking that people there have massively jumped into Bitcoin or crypto in general. It's just a circus show to sell you articles not containing factual information. Bitcoin doesn't get bills, food, etc, paid, their shitty fiat currency does, and as long as that doesn't change, people are more than willing to convert back to what we consider worth less than the dirt under our shoes.

The real store of values there are life necessities, not whatever crypto or fiat currency.

Everything comes with a risk, Bitcoin (from a non biased perspective) more than other assets, but we all want to have the best possible allocation of funds yielding the best returns. I honestly would say that investing in Bitcoin at this stage is less risky than investing in US stock with how they are screaming don't buy me. It's almost like how people thought it was a great time to buy the dip around $15,000 last year. Don't touch a falling knife.

If I was given the choice to pick a basket of US stocks worth $100,000 or a basket of Bitcoin worth $50,000 that I had to hold for 5 years straight without touching them, I would go for Bitcoin without having to think it through.

Market cap dominance is a worthless metric since it is based on what sites want you to believe, and not based on fundamentals. If you follow CMC closely, you'll notice that they have continuously been adding coins to their list, which obviously drags down Bitcoin's dominance. It doesn't mean Bitcoin has gotten worse and altcoins better, just that there is more rubbish in the industry.

Another thing that people fail to understand is how most of the altcoins as we know them today, won't be here anymore in the next 5 or so years. If you think that taking a long term position in altcoins is a good thing, I would seriously recommend people to think again and look at what really matters here.

If you plan to invest in coins anyway, think it through twice, perhaps another time to be sure, and figure out which coins aren't competing with Bitcoin, because these coins are likely going to make it on their own because they offer a different form of utility.

I think that buyers (or should I say window shoppers) are always waiting, regardless of the price. Today they plan to buy at $3500 and when we hit that price, they think it's better to wait for $3300, then $3000, etc.

It's safe to assume that most of the selling pressure we had to deal with came from ICO's holding large sums of Bitcoin or altcoins they convert to Bitcoin and then dump for USD. If Ethereum does well, there is less incentive for these entities to sell, and thus the selling pressure on Bitcoin's market decreases as well. It also incentivizes altcoin speculators to keep holding on to their Bitcoins, so it's positive in more ways than just one.

Keep accumulating Bitcoin people.

I use Bitcoin almost on a daily basis, and I noticed around me that some people actually prefer to be paid in Bitcoin rather than PayPal or whatever else.

I wanted to pay someone $100 through PayPal recently and couldn't complete the transfer because my balance wasn't enough due to the $7 fee it wanted to charge me. I had to top up my balance to complete the transaction because the other side didn't wan't to deal with anything other than PayPal.

This is something where Bitcoin shines, and I am certain that it will attract more and more users as PayPal & Co don't think it's necessary to lower their fees.

It's boring because people don't know how to utilize a market that doesn't move up much or down. In the end it's still relative, because even when the crypto market is boringly stable for people here, legacy traders would feast on it and still do.

People here look at the Gold market and consider it uber boring and don't see any way to make profits, but they blatantly discard that the Gold market, just like other legacy markets, thrives on leverage. Think Bitmex is crazy with 100x leverage? Legacy markets are even more of a gambling tool with 300-400x leverage. One tiny miscalculation and you are broke.

I like these sudden shifts. It's hilarious, especially if so called crypto influencers on youtube add fuel to the fire. When Ethereum was tanking a few weeks ago everyone was shitting on it and now it's amazing and will take over the world, and that just because the price went up.

Even if there is no direct reason for the price to pump like mad, it doesn't mean it has to go down. It could just as easily continue to move sideways for for a while, marking higher lows, and eventually break out to the upper side and leave $3xxx prices behind for ever. People seem to be overly bearish which makes me even more confident that we won't be spending much time below the $4000 level anymore.

I'm sure that a lot of people (who are in fiat or USDT) right now are waiting for the price to fall down in order to buy more, and they might be up for a nasty surprise in case the price doesn't fall down much lower than what it is right now. If you don't buy right now, even if it is just a small amount, you are not doing the right thing to benefit from the prices as seen right now. Today it's available, tomorrow it might not.

I think that's largely due to the fact that people have crazy high expectations. If you put the bar too high (which is purely based on what happened in 2017), you are begging to have yourself go through a year with only paper losses. It's beyond insane if you think about how people were expecting the price to hit like $50,000 before the end of 2018.

I kept lowering my expectations of the market as months went by, while people here continuously were talking about prices to break through the previous high and far beyond that. Perhaps that idiotic perma bulls such as Tom Lee and Mike Novogratz contributed to that, because average joes seem to consider everyone appearing on TV frequently an expert, because why else would they be invited, right?

Everything that's announced like this will turn out to be a big disappointment. It's going to be a real struggle to get around how regulated the stock market is, and how you can't just launch something and expect that it will be left alone by regulators. Stating that you don't have to ask for permission since you don't offer your services in the US doesn't make you any more credible or sustainable.

I rather buy the actual stock through my bank which acts as broker than using something that exposes me to an unkown form of counterparty risk.

Definitely. I recall having seen a video where Roger Ver and another dude explained how bad the situation was at that point. The point basically was that the dude who sent a transaction worth millions has seen the value of that transaction tank hard because the fee was too low and the transaction was stuck for a long time.

It's so ridiculous that it isn't even something you can take serious. If you send a transaction of that magnitute you will even include a fee of $1000 to make sure the transaction goes through with the first block. One can better 'lose' $1000 in fees than nearly a million in value. Another thing is that the dude could have double spent that transaction. High fees are obviously not something to cheer for, but it similarly isn't the end of the world.

People don't understand that BCash taking over half of Bitcoin's hashrate made the block times stretch all the way to 15-17 minutes instead of the 10 it usually hovers around. They also severely spammed the network to advertise their "cheap" chain. Take away the hashrate movements and the spam attacks, I dare to say that the fees would peak out at $10-$15 due to the price being insanely high.

That's what dollar cost averaging is for. Even if it falls down more, you'll hedge most of that by buying the dips every now and then. I would say that buying every 10%ish dip from where we are right now is a great way to enter the market.

The market isn't going to bottom out or consolidate at levels people want it to bottom out or consolidate at. In the long run, buying at $3800 or $3000 won't even make a difference. If you aren't comfortable with the market while accumulating, you can always have a short open as insurance, just make sure you utilize the stop loss function accordingly.

Bitmex pays out in BTC so price down means more BTC for you.

I doubt it, because even if they do withdraw their funds, they send it right back whenever the 'hype' around this event is over, the next day.

I'm more worried about the noobs following the herd just to be cool, because they have no clue about the importance of using trusted clients, signing keys before installing anything, securely generating key pairs, etc. If they withdraw their funds to an address generated by whatever malicious client, it's over.

Looking at the on-chain transaction volume today, there isn't much going on that would indicate any sort of success of this event.

It was way worse when China was making it look like they were a big deal. Each time the term regulations was mentioned it resulted in a 10-15% sell-off.

I like regulations, mainly for the fact that it halts the stupidity of what we went through last year, the ICO bubble. If governments also actively start chasing down exchanges like Hitbtc and Yobit it would be even better. In the end, with or without regulations, we're going through a cycle we have gone through for years already. Only time will help to bottom out, not regulations.

We never needed any sort of institutional grade platform to pump, and we certainly don't need it now. Bitcoin is nothing in its current form. One bit of an adoption boost is enough to do a x10-x20 from where we are now.

Lightning might not be solely related to Bitcoin, but once it does what it should be doing in the most convenient possible manner, the little utility that Litecoin has, which is relatively fast and cheap on-chain transactions, will become less of a thing as time goes by. It's not for nothing that Charlie Lee dumped the majority of his holdings. If you had any sort of grounded faith in your own project, you wouldn't be doing that.

People use that what they consider to be the most reliable and adopted networks, and Litecoin isn't part of that. I'm not saying it will vanish, but it is standing on its last legs. Bitcoin and Ethereum are the only ones with a very strong network effect, and the trash coins below them don't stand a single chance.

I'm very conservative. My target for 2019 is breaking $6000 and maintaining it similar to how we did so before that level broke.

2019 will be a great year for those who are looking to average themselves into the market. I usually have a certain part of my main income be sent directly to my savings account, but will use that to buy Bitcoin instead. We won't hover below $4000 for ever, so better utilize current market and buy into people's fear, because once we're starting to go up again people will definitely regret not having bought when they had the chance.

It's only a matter of time before 'is it still a good time to buy at X or Y level?' threads pop up here.

People here have turned being a hodler into a meme sort of thing. Everyone can hodl through an increase when prices keep going up, everyone is an expert when prices keep going up, but once the market is done pumping, it's over for the far majority of the people.

People don't know what it is to buy something based on fundamentals. The only reason they buy crypto is because it's either going up, or they believe it will do so, but have not one single clue about what that increase might be based on. We are dealing with gamblers here, and it will only get worse as more of these find their way to the crypto market.

The very fact that some shitcoins are worth billions in market cap is an indication of how stupid the general "investor" or "hodler" here is.

If the mass is preparing for a good 2019 just like how they expected 2018 to be a good year, I'll probably be better off lowering my expectations of the market even further.

I'll only turn bullish in the near term if we break the $6000 level, and as long as that isn't the case, there isn't much reason to expect any sort of increase beyond $5000. $6000 was what people considered very low before it broke, and now that "very low" level will form a massive challenge to break through. If we manage to do that, 2019 is what I consider to be a great year.

In the end, be careful what you wish for people, have more respect for the levels we're currently hovering around, regardless of how "low" they may look.

Bakkt's futures start at 1BTC per contract. 25BTC applies to VanEck's minimum ETF share price.

The whole idea behind the hype is that people blindly assume that all these Bitcoin backed platforms will empty the spot market and inflate the price to whatever insane levels. That's not the case, and it doesn't even make sense with how illiquid the market is. These entities buy from private sellers, being mining farms, old hands, OTC desks, etc.

Only if the demand is so high that the OTC market as a whole runs dry, the spot market might and probably will react to that with green. I however don't expect any of this to have an impact in the near term. It will take a lot of buying power to dent the OTC market.