In the end, we are dealing with a market that has two sides to it. One side most people here had no problem with enjoying last year, and the other (ugly) side is what gets people depressed. Sure, the market doesn't look good, but this is what happens when people buy coins blindly regardless of the price in order to buy into ICO's.

The reason people didn't care what levels they bought at is because of how tokens were priced against the US dollar. If you want to buy $10,000 worth of ICO tokens, it doesn't matter if you buy Ether at $1000 or Bitcoin at $15,000, the result is still that you get $10,000 worth of ICO tokens. In that regard, Bitcoin and Ethereum could have easily broken through $30,000 and $2000 if the craze lasted longer.

It's just waiting for the next hype to pop up and we repeat the same cycle again. People never learn. I thought they would, but the idiotic gamblers we were dealing with years ago are still here, and they brought their friends and family with them.

It will continue to happen, and it will get worse as time goes by. Most of the compliant exchanges are so strict with their policies, and will probably become fort knox pretty soon, that people are more or less forced to use non compliant shitcoin exchanges. So it's not really related to hacks and inside jobs.

Binance isn't exactly a shitcoin exchange, but their success comes from the fact that they don't care about regulations. The exchanges below Binance, which do classify as shitcoin exchanges, differentiate themselves by adding the shitcoins Binance doesn't want to list. In other words, it's a whole industry that emerged and will continue to grow till regulators step in and put an end to this nonsense.

It will definitely be a waiting game, especially if we're following what happened back in 2015 after hitting the bottom. We were stuck below $300 for such a long period of time, combined with a decent level of stability, that it actually frustrated a lot of people here. Back then people were speculating to see even lower lows, and the same applies to the current situation.

It's quite funny how everyone said that you shouldn't compare the previous correction with the current one, but it actually shows very similar patterns.

I support them into selling off all their Bitcoins, because the sooner they run out of their stacks, the less buying power they have, and thus the less artificial buy support they can provide to keep BCash around the 0.05BTC level. Lower price = low demand for miners = Bitmain sucking on a piece of wood.

The very fact that people hope that one of the most successful companies in the space will fail just shows how toxic they are. I'm thankful that Bitmain wanted another SHA256 network to compensate for less efficient miners due to Segwit. Now the trash has forked off, Bitcoin's development roadmap is brighter than ever before.

We'll see where this goes, but with Bitmain becoming weaker and weaker, BCash will follow soon since Bitmain is the only factor of value it enjoys.

He didn't say it doesn't work, he just referred to the fact that there isn't always a point in trying to bet on a certain market movement, which makes sense, especially after how the $5800 level was broken and the market really needed to find a point to calm down at, which it seems to have, for now.

Based on his view on TA he is not all that active with trading, so it's likely based on long term fundamentals rather than short term bets on the direction of the market.

Admittedly, regardless of it being a guess, it's always better to trade based on an educated guess rather than a blind guess like most of the people here do. I think it's safe to say that TA, especially in the last year or so, has turned into a meme sort of thingy due to all the clowns on social media selling signals and memberships.

Failed to break $5000? Lol? The price wasn't even close to that level. It couldn't maintain it's position with the $4000-$4200 levels, which is a clear indication that we should remain conservative and not rehash idiotic TA youtubers and their predictions that we'll likely go up to $5000 or $6000 and from there straight back to $3000.

I thought I have seen the worst during the bull run in terms of youtubers pretending to be a pro trader, but currently it's at another level. It surprises me that some of them still have pretty decent view rates per video after all their failed predictions. It could very well be that we're dealing with fools thinking that the next time will result in a different outcome, well, it could, the same applies to gambling.

Of course, because no one here has one single clue about what the market will do. If people had a slight clue they wouldn't be here, but enjoying their free time either shorting or longing the market, and then entertain themselves counting their profits and looking at pretty ladies in bikinis.

In the end, all the different predictions make up for a nice average ratio you can use as a sentiment indicator. If most people here think the price will go up, you are likely better off opening a short position. If most people here think the price will go down, you open a long position. If it's 50/50 you don't do anything and take a well needed break from the market.

The mass is a pretty decent indicator and this forum is a close reflection of that.

It reminds me of the crypto market after Bitcoin starts pumping due to a short squeeze. 

The fact that Gold hasn't reacted to these massive gains in a negative manner tells me that those who are moving to Gold don't believe in this suckers increase, which I can perfectly understand. Obviously, more time needs to pass in order to see the actual effect of today's pump on Gold, but as long as Gold doesn't give a single damn, the probability of this pump being temporary is on the higher side.

Either way, this pump is nothing in comparison to how much market cap the stocks lost in the last couple of months. It's a tiny drop in a massive bucket.

You can definitely safely use a mobile wallet client like Electrum. You at all times are the sole owner of your private keys, which is what matters here, and it's a light weight client, also very important. As long as you have safely stored your recovery seeds offline (i.e. written on a piece of paper), nothing will happen to your coins.

I seriously wish that the legitimate clients would put more time and effort into making their clients look more appealing, because most of the average joes add a lot value to that, which is why they blatantly pick online wallets over clients that store private keys locally. In the same way, Electrum is pretty boring in terms of UI, and that should change.

I get it, development and security of the client comes always first, but in all the years none of them has done anything to make their client look more attractive.

Good to see that you got your coins back, I'm sure (unfortunately) there are thousands of victims who will never be that lucky.

It's yet another fractional reserve operation. They pay smoothly as long as their income is sufficient, but stop doing so when there is nothing left to pay out because they have used up user funds to invest in more mining equipment and/or very likely an expensive life style. Genesis Mining has been a problem magnet since the very beginning and will shut down like that eventually.

I'm glad that the bear market knocked some sense into people's heads which (for now) prevents them from investing in shitty cloud mining contracts.

It's not like the entire governmental system consists of old farts. I am actually of believe that most of the governments have been pretty fair with their regulations concerning Bitcoin, especially when you take into consideration how disruptive this technology fundamentally can be.

In the end, governments adapt to every situation with time, and that will also apply to crypto currencies. I'm pretty certain that most of the people here don't even know what this space is about, so how can we expect the government who isn't involved in crypto to know it? Crypto does, governments react, that's how it works. Japan has been a great example. They very quickly reacted to the exchange hacks in the best possible way, and that will eventually lead to better/safer exchanges.

It has gone so far, that they allow the industry itself to form a regulative body in the space. That's progress.

At this point it's definitely not profitable. I'm sure that like +90% of the nodes don't even make $1 per month. It will all come down to volume in the later phases of Lightning. If you have thousands of transactions running through your node on a daily basis at like 10-50 sats per transaction, it will add up if you look at what you made after 30 days.

If you have more than one node running, you'll make even more money. Eventually I think that one single node should be able to generate $50-$100 on average per month, especially when the price moves closer to its high in the forthcoming years. Renting a server or running something like a RPI at home will definitely be more than worthwhile in that case.

You help the network become more secure, liquid, and you make a bit of money on top of it. Doesn't sound bad.

Ethereum had a positive boost due to Raiden as tier two scaling update, plus the block rewards will shrink from 3ETH to 2ETH next month, so it's not really a surprise that you saw a pop there.

In the end, I strongly believe that it will be altcoins triggering the recovery, mainly because of how all the shitty ICO's will then be stimulated to hold their bags instead of converting them to BTC>USD, which has been negatively affecting this market for a long while now. Even after Ethereum's +90% drop it still looks like there is more air that needs to get out.

The market will very likely bottom out at levels people won't be able to prepare themselves from. And yes, it might very well be that we hit the bottom, that's the best thing of a market that's so speculative. People have in mind that $3000 or whatever other level has to be tested first in order to bottom out, while as I said, it very likely won't bottom out at levels people can prepare themselves for.

Tone Vays has become somewhat of an idiot lately. He wants to see entities as Tim Draper to give up on Bitcoin and dump their coins before we can expect a bottom to be in sight, lol.

There is no shortage of new average joes entering the market, which is why you keep seeing articles with these headlines pop up, and that for years now. I'm certain that the news outlets themselves know better, but just act stupid to have their articles look interesting enough to click at. Ah well, news outlets are businesses in the end, so we can't really expect much to change.

It's up to the people to research what they invest in. If you sell based on silly articles, you don't belong here. It's like a test; if you fail, you are out. Good riddance.

It can be seen as trading, yes.

In that case you have to find cash settled platforms. The pros and more experienced investors have platforms such as CBOE and CME to work with, while the more average retailers use platforms as Robinhood and eToro. I'm sure there are a few more, but most of them are unregulated platforms you definitely don't want to deal with.

I like to work with Bitmex because it allows you to settle your contracts in BTC against the US dollar, and have your contracts pay out in BTC, regardless of what coin on their platform you long or short. The advantage of not dealing with fiat on Bitmex is that you aren't subject to ridiculous KYC/AML measures you otherwise would be.

I am hoping for that to eventually happen.

It's okay to use fiat as a benchmark to value goods, because that will give you an indication of real world use versus the value something represents. It's close to impossible to figure out what the value of a Bitcoin unit is if you don't want to use fiat as benchmark. In that case it will probably require some sort of an experimental phase where people trade Bitcoin for goods and from there figure out what a Bitcoin unit should represent in value.

In the end, it's important for people to realize that Bitcoin itself isn't a bubble, its highly speculative market can be due to gamblers and get rich quick noobs. Bitcoin's tech is working, provides security, is digital Gold, processes trillions of dollars worth of transactions per year, will become a much better currency with Lightning, etc.

Buying at the wrong price isn't really a problem as long as you haven't gone all in. It all comes down to wisely distributing your entry points, regardless of the sentiment. Even if you bought near the all time high last year, you for sure will have some money aside that you can put into the market to tank your break even point from $18,000'ish levels to $8000'ish levels, and the more you buy in at current levels the lower your average will be.

I honestly am past the stage where I feel sorry for people. If you don't utilize the current prices in your advantage you are just a sucker. On top that, if you think you'll reach a point at which you dump your coins in panic if the price reaches X level on the lower side, why wait? Sell right now.

I'm all in favor at looking at the numbers, and when you see that nearly half of all Bitcoin's nodes are Lightning ready, and that without any financial incentive, and how it's still more or less a technical thingy, it tells me that when it starts to get easier to set up a node, and financially more rewarding, we'll see an explosion in Lightning nodes pop up.

Every time I look at the stats, I see an increase in nodes and channels. It's a bull run in terms of growth, and one that will continue to rush forward for many more years to come.

The very average user will indeed end up using a third party node to connect to, but that's perfectly fine. People have all the freedom to choose which node they want to connect to.

There is no general level miners are comfortable with. If you look at current prices and the hashrate, it shows stability around 35Eh/s and that's perfectly profitable for those who are mining. In fact, mining has become more profitable for miners now the block times have gone down to like 9.2/9.5 minutes while they were like 10.5/11 minutes not even a week ago.

Most of the miners who are leaving are those who bought their equipment during the bull run last year and probably expected it to stay around or over the $10,000 level for ever. If you haven't done anything to optimize your operation, you'll be out of this business in a matter of months or even weeks.

Mining was EXTREMELY profitable during the bull run with how there wasn't enough hashrate that could be added to the network. Just like how we have get rich quick crypto investors we also have get rich quick investors in the mining space.