It depends on what they were doing. What should be done is to have them communicate with their users in a clear manner, because all their vague notifications do is cause confusion and feed fudders to spread nonsense.

I have already seen people on Reddit talk about Poloniex being hacked and for that reason disabled withdrawals. This is the fud Poloniex could have prevented by simply stating what is going on in the background.

I would have expected more professionalism from Poloniex, especially with how much of a sensitive issue it is when exchanges halt withdrawals.

What did you expect? That it would be entirely different by now? No way. It looks like they are intentionally not doing anything with Poloniex, possibly to get rid of lower range retail users?

It may be that Poloniex was only taken over because it would directly become a regulated exchange, and that alone is worth plenty. If they really wanted to turn it into a crypto powerhouse they would put more effort into it.

It wouldn't surprise me if Poloniex as brand will be ditched at a later point, all to merge that platform into what the financial institutions backing Circle are likely working on, which is a trading desk.

It's not meant to represent something decentralized. It's just a convenient value tool for people to hedge price drops and have these stablecoins be transferred to other exchanges for arbitrage opportunities.

With fiat you are forced to verify yourself, and it can't be transferred to exchanges in a quick fashion with how you rely on banks to process these transactions, which can take days in some cases.

I'm not a fan of stablecoins either, but there are enough traders globally who are actively using them in their advantage on a daily basis. As long as people can use them without verification they will remain popular.

They make it seem like they know what they are talking about, but it's still nothing more than an educated guess. I haven't seen many actually admit that they are shit in trading, which is quite weird to be honest.

If you take into consideration that +90% of the traders lose, but the majority of those who are active on social media make it look like they book profits, you know that they are talking out of their ass.

The real winners are those who hodl through bear markets and patiently wait for the next bull run. Direct gain is that you don't have to stress about trades and charts, but have enough time that you can allocate to more productive activities.

It began back when Silk Road was still operating, and ended shortly after that. We never managed to regain the share of actual currency use, and after so many years that's quite a disappointment in my opinion.

We need the lightning network up and running and people to shift their focus more towards Bitcoin being a currency instead of an investment tool. I am confident that our patience will pay off, but it could take a couple of years.

People in third world countries are the first to adapt to the change with how they really need it, and for that reason I expect most of the growth to happen on that front. Bitcoin is there to 'bank' the unbanked.

Not sure if it's a global policy, but as far as I have seen, even LocalBitcoins is no longer the preferred option to go for due to their 'recent' policy change. Authorities are doing the best they can to cap our freedom.

Trying to find someone locally to trade with isn't that much of an interesting option either, especially with how buyers and sellers are walking targets because they have either cash or coins on them.

Even Bitcoin ATMs have all adapted to KYC/AML policies and even require selfies in some cases. Within 2 years 99% of the services will force you to verify yourself, and the other 1% will consist of unregulated disasters.

I actually can see this be a favorable outcome. It speeds up the process of having regulators finally dig into this space, which otherwise would annoy you and me somewhere in the later future.

Regulations are inevitable, and for that reason I rather see them be forced through right now than tomorrow. It will take away uncertainties as well, which should open the door even further for non crypto parties to enter.

Do you think that ICOs were the biggest ever crypto related shitshow or will we face a new hype that will make the ICO boom look like a joke? I personally believe that we've seen the worst.

Agreed. I really thought that we would be seeing more exchanges incorporate fiat base pairs, which would significantly strengthen the market overall, but we're dealing with an influx of toxic stable tokens instead.

Another thing is that with how we will be dealing with more stable coin base pairs, the order books will become a whole lot thinner, and thus easier to manipulate by whoever has deep enough pockets.

It will be an ugly pop for sure in case things go wrong catastrophically, but with how people here live by the day, they don't give a shizzle about these stable coins gaining more ground by the day. They will do the crying later, when it's too late.

I actually can see it happen at some point in the future. It will however come down to how well the lightning network functions, and how the current routing problems will be taken care of.

Bitcoin as decentralized protocol will never be able to overtake the usability and convenience that fiat offers, but we can definitely expect a tremendous improvement making it catch up on fiat more than central banks are comfortable with.

At the end of the day, people should be using that what gets the job done in the most efficient way. For some that will be fiat, and others really need that what Bitcoin has to offer, especially in third world countries.

If Bitcoin at some point in the future becomes just as dominant as fiat in terms of local currency functionality, people no longer need to use fiat and no longer need to see Bitcoin as an investment tool.

It might not sound all that realistic right now, but we've seen how people in economically weaker countries are more likely to adapt Bitcoin than to keep using that what they had for years but isn't working properly.

Lightning is perfect for that. It provides insanely cheap and fast transactions, and that's exactly how money should function. Bitcoin has always been money, people tend to forget that due to their greed.

The thing with those who keep themselves busy with technical analysis is that there is always an excuse to make up as to why their analysis was wrong. They'll keep guessing till they at some point guess right.

One day you read an article about how bulls have taken over, where the day after that you'll see articles pop up stating that the bears are back in town. It's the same nonsense they keep rehashing over and over again.

The thing with technical analysis is that depending on what time frame of the chart you use as reference, you can make it look as bullish or bearish as you want. It depends on people's mood which side they go with.

It's obviously Bitfinex directly being responsible for that artificial increase. The price jumped from $6300 to $7700 in a very short period of time, and it starts to look like WEX in a less severe way, and that's pretty bad.

Some large holders must have been desperate enough to buy up the price that much in order to get rid of their USDT holdings. Some exchanges have even halted USDT deposits, and rightfully so.

The last thing you want as exchange is to have people deposit USDT and withdraw crypto from your platform. We'll see where it goes from here, but it's not really looking good. Premiums in prices is mostly the first red flag.

Then you can instantly discard 95% of the altcoin market. Most projects hire devs in order to improve implementations or to add extra features other coins have been rocking for years, all to please their noob backing.

Yobit for example has coins listed that haven't generated even $100 in 24H volume once in the last 12-24 months. In the same way, Binance is dealing with a large number of shitcoins as well.

People make fun of exchanges as Coinbase for not having many coins listed, but they forget that this is how an exchange should be operated. The majority of the altcoins are nothing more than pest that should be eradicated immediately.

It doesn't matter how experienced people are with these corrections because it's impossible to know where the market will bottom out. Before we broke $10,000 people really believed that would be the bottom.

When the $10,000 mark broke people said $9000 would be the bottom, then $8000, $7000, $6000, and so forth. No one here knew that $5700-$5800 would be it after how it has proven its strength more than once.

Traders usually only cash out fractions of their profits, so no doubt about there being traders who didn't manage to unload most of what they gained last year. Going all in or all out is never an option well thinking traders consider.

Stability might look like it's needed to attract that type of adoption, but we're proven wrong with how payment processors experience record lows in terms of actual revenue and usage.

People aren't comfortable spending their coins during stable time frames, especially not during a bear market. Every corner of the industry is suffering from it and there is no way to stop it as long as we aren't going up.

Most of the spending happens when the price moves up with how easy of an option it is to cash out your coins without being taxed. In other words, we're far from our ideal picture where Bitcoin functions as currency.

It doesn't shock me at all that he's jailed for that long, we're talking about China here. What shocks me is how stupid people are to even attempt this within a country where human rights and moral standards don't exist.

Thus far nothing has been able to beat the news that came out earlier this year about Russian nuclear scientists who used a super computer within a nuclear facility to mine Bitcoin. They must have been desperate.  

I actually wonder what happened with them. Considering how big of a deal it is, I expected far more coverage but there hasn't been anything other than the initial news articles.  

Bitfinex is the last place anyone should be heading to when it comes to using a safe and reliable exchange. Their current banking problems are yet another obstacle traders there are dealing with, hence the premium in price.

Kraken has improved a lot after their horrible problems months ago. I honestly didn't expect them to recover like this. Much respect to them.

Another exchange that does a good job in terms of EUR deposits and withdrawals, and happens to operate the largest BTC/EUR market, is Coinsbank. They comply with regulations as well, so another plus there.

Any coin can potentially go through that significant of a correction, and while it may not be likely that it happens to Bitcoin as well, the possibility is still there. What's Bitcoin being used for? What prevents it from correcting 90%?

Bitcoin last year peaked at $19,500 from where a 90% correction would mean a bottom of $1950. Is it really that unlikely? Back in 2017 the price dipped slightly below the $800 mark and pumped straight to $19,500.

I'm not saying it's going to happen, I don't even expect it to happen, but I'm not discarding it either. We have to remain realistic here, there isn't much other than speculation to hold on to. Use is negligible at this point in time.

That's why the best way to counter the uncertainty of not knowing if the price is under or overvalued, is to simply dollar cost average your entry points. I haven't done anything else in the last years.

It's impossible to find out the right moments to enter, because today's "low" price might turn out to be tomorrow's peak that people wish they would have sold. This market has no mercy for its participants.

People quite often go wrong because they assume crypto is cheap when it has gone down with 50% in a matter of months, but don't understand that it can go down even 90% in some cases.

XRP as one of the largest coins went through a +90% correction from top to bottom.

The mass needs centralized money because they have no clue about how to take care of their finances in a responsible manner. Them using decentralized crypto currencies is a guaranteed way to lose money.

Every day people get their bank accounts emptied, send money to the wrong recipient, get scammed on internet, and so forth. All these average joe mistakes can't be corrected if there wasn't centralized money helping them recover it.

I will always keep using fiat even if crypto becomes globally accepted as medium of exchange. Locally it's definitely fiat that will maintain its lead, where online and cross border transactions is where crypto shines.

Why choose one option when you can have both working in your advantage without any problems?