What's the difference between a normal adjustment and a panic sell?

It's normal for markets to overvaluate assets, only to crash down and undervaluate them at a later time. Bitcoin is no exception and much more extreme in terms of price movements, both up and down. I know we've been spoiled by the recent bull market, but the price fluctuations Bitcoin has gone through have been much harsher in much shorter timeframes just a few years back. The reality is that Bitcoin is still a highly speculative asset with little comparables for gauging the "proper" price level leading to the volatility we still see today.

There might be large scale market manipulation at play, but if that's the case it likely was the cause of the recent bull market as well, not just the crash.

Yes, if you already have a direct channel opened to your friend. However you don't get to choose which route your payment takes. It may cross your friend's node, but it may also take an entirely different route.



As mentioned by Kakmakr, the whole idea behind Lightning Network is to have a multitude of interconnected nodes (ie. wallets with open channels) form a network of payment channels that can relay transactions without requiring 2 parties to be directly connected to one another -- as long as there is a viable path that transactions can take ie. as long as they are at least indirectly connected. That's the Network in Lightning Network.

You won't get in trouble with the tax offices as long as you properly report your income and pay your taxes. So for tax purposes you will need to keep track of your arbitrage trades and the profits you made. You will also need to be able to proof these trades. In case beneficial holding periods apply, you will have to decide whether you calculate your profits using the FIFO (first in first out) or LIFO (last in first out) principle -- and stick to it.

Your bank may cause you some problems in that you may trigger their fraud department and could be asked in detail to explain on where the transactions are coming from. Anecdotally banks have supposedly shut down or frozen customer's accounts due to cryptocurrency related bank transactions. Keep in mind that your bank is likely to forward any information on larger money movements to your local tax authorities either way, especially if these transactions show a change in your usual account usage.

Depending on the amount of money and where you live you might need to notify your bank and authorities in advance of such transactions (for example in Germany any border-crossing transaction of EUR 12,500,- or beyond needs to be reported).




You will have to pay taxes in whatever country you are tax resident, regardless of where you bought or sold the coins. If you ever had ties to the US, but are now tax resident of another country, you might get twice the paper work but will likely only have to pay taxes in the country where you reside.


Disclaimer: Not an expert, everything I mentioned is only a general rule of thumb from my own layman experience and will highly depend on your individiual situation. If you are serious about running arbitrage at scale (monthly trading volume at 3-4 EUR/USD digits or beyond) I'd recommend getting a tax advisor.

The reliability and effectiveness of technical analysis is rather disputed, however basic knowledge of it helps understanding how the market "ticks".

Here's an introduction that I personally found rather helpful:

https://www.investopedia.com/university/technical/


Be aware that daytrading is also a great way to lose money, not just to gain some. If you're new to crypto and markets in general I'd recommend taking a step back and watching the markets a bit before deciding on whether you want to become a trader, hodler or bystander.

I think many people are still disillusioned from Bitcoin not appreciating in value forever (who would have thought) so the market is still wary. This leads me to believe that we'll revisit the USD 10,000,- levels again rather sooner than later. Question being whether we hold that level and go up again, or break through with a continuing downtrend. It seems to me like the next few days are going to be critical in terms of short- to mid-term price development.

Depends on the altcoin. Some run on a proof of work blockchain blockchain just like Bitcoin. Some run on a blockchain of their own that is protected by a different consensus scheme such as proof of stake. Some don't have their own blockchain but are issued on an already existing blockchain (eg. ICOs running on Ethereum, USDT running on top of OMNI running on top of BTC). Some don't have a blockchain at all and follow a wholly different approach.



I'm not sure I understand your question.

Tokens and coins are issued in various ways... through mining, airdrops, ICOs, token sales, etc.

They gain their value in fiat terms by being traded on one of the many exchanges.



I don't quite get what you are asking.



"some institutions are still using the same practices they used when they were swapping slaves for spice"

lol... Gotta remember that one.

Cryptocurrencies provide interfaces to which other software can talk (eg. to check or send transactions). Their internal accounting will likely be able to talk to such an interface, otherwise it would not be able to send bank transactions either.

Some banks already conducted research in terms of how they could benefit from blockchain-like systems (eg. European Central Bank with Japan), conclusion being mostly: Not viable. Which comes to little surprise because they of course want to run their own, private, permissioned blockchain which leads the concept of cryptocurrencies kind of ad absurdum.

So if by banks integrating blockchains you refer to banks using blockchains for inter-bank settlement -- no, I don't see this happening any time soon. Especially not on public blockchains. Using cryptocurrencies to interface with their clients -- sure. That has basically been the case with Fidor bank for at least 5 years by now.

To use Armory securely, you need an offline PC and an online PC. On the offline PC you create the wallet and generate a watch-only wallet for your online PC. On the offline PC you don't need to install Bitcoin Core, however on the online PC you do.

Bitcoin Core and downloading the whole blockchain is a prerequisite for running Armory in online mode.


For further details I'd recommend heading to the Armory subforum:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=97.0


Alternatively I'd recommend either getting a hardware wallet for a great mix of convenience and security -- either a Trezor or a Ledger Nano S -- or if security is not that much of a concern try Electrum.

If every financial transaction were to be made over a public, shared blockchain, using labeled addresses (eg. this address belongs to the ministry of defense, this one contains Apple's R&D budget...) complete transparency, auditability and consequently automation of most aspects of book keeping could very well be imaginable.

However given our current understanding of blockchains such an approach would be technologically unfeasible. The amount of transactional data created by all private persons, corporations and governments combined is pretty much unfathomable. VISA level transaction throughput is already pretty much impossible to do on-chain. And VISA only handles a fraction of global payments and remittance.

Sounds like it would make for an interesting social experiment, but it's not exactly viable for a decentralized ledger (who verifies the ledger? who prevents the ledger from being manipulated? who determines who verifies the ledger? how do you make sure that people don't assume multiple identities? etc).

One may even argue that you basically just described capitalism: Distributing currency to people that offer services that is deemed valuable by society corporations and paying them according to what the public, ie. the market, decides.



Who or what would maintain these blockchains? Anything digital and you're back at PoW, PoS, PoX...

Both hardware wallets are fine and have a great track record. In terms of basic functionality such as security and determining transaction fees both are pretty much equal. Ledger is cheaper and supports more coins. Can't compare in terms of overall user experience as I only have a Trezor though.

I think you guys are overestimating the amount of billionaires or even millionaires currently involved in crypto.



Depends on BTC's stability rather than its price or even its growth. Institutional investors care less about getting astronomic gains and more about a stable investment with healthy appreciation. Until we get there -- that is, if we get there -- BTC still has to grow quite a bit in both market cap and trading volume, as to make it harder to move the market. Regardless whether it's whales playing the pump-and-dump game or organic boom-and-bust market cycles.

Which one? There's so many of them on coinmarketcap right now!

In other news, a bit early to call it a dead cat bounce yet, isn't it?

So far I'm not aware of any viable concepts for creating a blockchain-less cryptocurrency that doesn't rely on centralized entities for either token issuance, transaction security or even both. And I'm sure it's not for lack of trying.



Before the mempool was congested as it is now 0-conf transactions were viable for most use cases were fast transactions were of essence, allowing for basically instant transactions. With the development of Lightning Network we'll get instant transactions again by being able to use payment channels.



Trusted counterparties simply send you your coins back if justified, so you can already do that. It's just that you don't have a third party able to enforce such a return transaction for you.

Making transactions reversible by default without both parties consenting or involving a third party as arbiter makes a payment method useless.



Any PoX process requires expenditure of resources in one way or another. Thus there will always be "inequality".

If you are referring to ASIC vs GPU/CPU mining -- there are plenty of alternatives out there.



Unmanageable how?

BTC dominance is a rather useless metric, especially since new alts keep popping up by the hundreds. Things only get interested if any of the top 5 coins get close to BTC's market cap, as was briefly the case with ETH last summer. Question being whether it's going to be ETH again or one of the contestants that are trying to give BTC a run for its money.



Here's the thing about regulation and privacy focused cryptos though: I'm not sure whether an increase of regulation would be all that positive for anonymous coins, given that stronger regulation may force exchanges to explicitely delist non-traceable cryptocurrencies.

They could charge for that, but that would simply drive people away to other exchanges that don't. Traditional exchanges and brokers usually don't charge for unfilled orders either.

Note that this is also the reason why you should largely ignore buy and sell walls and why market depth can hardly be trusted.

You omitted looking at the Demand side of things, which by itself can be broken up in 2 factors

i) Community -- The larger the community behind a cryptocurrency, the more people involved, the higher the demand. Bitcoin's community has vastly grown over the years.

ii) Availability -- The ease of buying a cryptocurrency. While exchanges are currently overwhelmed with verifying new customers, it has never been so easy to buy cryptocurrencies.


On a higher level I would also add Trustworthiness: The more people trust in a cryptocurrency, the less prone they are to panic selling, making for a stabler market.

Lightning Network has different dev teams working on it than Bitcoin itself. Some developers work on both. LN does not get added to the Bitcoin blockchain and it does not require a modification of the Bitcoin protocol. Rather it will require the use of new clients (ie. wallets) that know how to open Lightning channels and how to handle Lightning transactions.

Deployment is happening as we speak with the first few people running Lightning nodes on mainnet. This means LN is already live, however using it is not recommended for the average user yet as LN still needs to be thoroughly tested and improved.

The MtGox crash was just a minor setback though, another bull market soon followed. What really triggered crypto winter was when China cracked down on Bitcoin in late 2013. Sounds familiar?

I'm ATH agnostic right now (ie. I don't expect one to happen this year, but also wouldn't be surprised if it did), but to be honest a cool down of 2-3 years would be fine with me. Right now there's too much of a focus on price and getting rich quick. A new crypto winter would thin out both alts and speculators and give devs some time to work on protocol improvements without everyone breathing down their necks and pushing rhetorics in front of technological concerns.

That seems to be the approach that HTLC.me is following. It's fine with testnet coins, but I'm still not sure how to feel about mainnet on-chain transactions taking place without user interaction. I guess in the end people will have multiple implementations to choose from, depending on how much convenience vs control they want.




Yep, just get testnet bitcoins from one of the faucets. Here for example:

https://testnet.manu.backend.hamburg/faucet

In Eclair swipe to the leftmost screen for your testnet address (starts with 2...) and once you got some coins swipe to the rightmost screen and open a new channel by tapping on the big green plus button. Autoconnect should suffice for the first try.

Once the connection is confirmed (ie. the channel state says "normal") you can send lightning transactions from the main screen by scanning payment requests -- eg. on yalls.org or by creating a payment request for yourself on the HTLC.me web wallet.

Oh this post aged well, good call OP!

Who knows, maybe USD 10,000,- will hold after all, but things look rather grim right now.



Bubble or no bubble, I'm getting my popcorn ready. No matter if it ends up in an epic recovery or a pluge to despair, it's going to be a rollercoaster either way. Enjoy the ride, folks.