Interesting video. Pretty sure I've seen at least part of it before.


I personally don't think that the creation of other crypto assets or projects necessarily will depreciate the value of bitcoins. It may decrease the market share of bitcoins in the overall crypto market, but since the crypto assets that are on sale with an initial public offering right now are completely different from bitcoin in nature (a lot probably can't even be classified as 'currency').

What will affect bitcoin's value and inflation is the rate at which it's being produced at, which right now is 12.5. The growth of bitcoin's supply is controlled, which is extremely different from the system that fiat operates in which can often leading to debasement of currency in a very short amount of time due to government mismanagement.

What you say regarding bitcoin produced without an increase in demand in the economy for BTC leading to inflation is true, but right now, I think the rate of adoption far exceeds what bitcoin's inflation figures are. And the beauty of a disinflationary system like bitcoin is that as adoption stops growing as fast as BTC gets widely adopted, so does the rate of growth in the money supply.

There is simply too much demand for coins below the $3k level in my opinion, which is probably part of the reason why we saw a strong resurgence of prices during this timeframe.

Most of the predictions that people make especially on mainstream media is completely bogus, and you have to realise that. They do it to create sensationalist headlines that grab attention, inspire fear (especially in this bear market), etc., not to actually try to accurately speculate on bitcoin's price.

I do think that further dips in price is possible, given that I don't think we're far enough in the bear market to say that the recovery is actually happening yet. But certainly not to $1k or even $2k. There is plenty of institutional demand for bitcoin, now that a lot of new players have came in, which means that there will be more support for prices imo if it ever happens to drop below $3k.

Ponzi scheme: A scam that pays out previous investors by taking a portion of the deposit of subsequent investors.

Ethereum Tree: A project that pays previous investors by taking 10% of the deposit of subsequent investors.

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You in saying Ethereum Tree is the perfect project just completely exposes yourself, either as a shill or completely ignorant to the fact that this is a complete and utter scam. I don't know how to put it more clearly to you than what I just did above.

They have no business model (apart from their pyramidal/ponzi structure) that produces sustainable profits, and even though they may be doing this on the Ethereum network without intermediaries, it's still a ponzi scheme nonetheless that will eventually reach a breaking point.

It's literally HYIP games in the earlier days reborn on blockchains. And nothing else.

100% correct. I don't think there is really any chance the court is going to rule in blockchain.com's favour, though since blockchain.com is obviously a much bigger company they may be better equipped to fight the case.

I mean, assuming that the use of the domain name "blockchain.io" does violate blockchain.com's trademark, wouldn't that mean as soon as you get a trademark, you own all domain names that are associated with the name, and no one else is able to use it? That's a completely absurd proposition to make, imo.

I'm not sure what blockchain.com is trying to achieve here, but it could potentially be trying to bully an industry competitor for sure. I really doubt that they care that much about the actual trademark dispute, but more about pushing the smaller companies out of the market.

Countless other ponzi schemes have said the exact same thing. This proves absolutely nothing. They probably can't even name the people that they supposedly "employ".

All you really need to look at to justify calling this a scam is the fact that they are offering such high returns without any sort of real business model. They are probably not even a ponzi in the sense that they will probably not even pay the initial investors, but rather just scam you out of your investment altogether. That has been the trend lately with these HYIP sites.

Also, take a look at their site. Extremely poorly designed and full of spelling mistakes. No legit investment firm would ever do this, period. Don't believe the lies that comes out of their forum rep's mouth. They're targeting newbies who are most vulnerable to these obvious scams, but all you need is common sense.

I personally would not do it. The whole point of a collateral is to give the lender security. If the loan isn't paid in full (principle + interest) then the lender should not be forced to give up the collateral.

Also, him trying to sell the account is indeed shady. I wouldn't encourage that behaviour by giving him his account back.

He should be repaying his loan with his own money, not with the proceeds of selling his collateral. Unless you've made a formal agreement in terms of giving back his account due to him repaying the principle section of the loan, I wouldn't do it given that there has been multiple extensions already and he has failed on his promises on many levels, and that the account sold wouldn't do any good now that you've made it public anyways.

Perfectmoney is quite liquid in terms of its conversion to bitcoin, because of its irreversibility, which means that you will have no trouble in finding exchangers for this.

As BitMaxz said, Changer.com is a good site to go with given the fact that it's been around for a long time and its reputation has been fairly good. No KYC required, their support has been pretty responsive for the times I used them, and I never had any issues.

There is a list of exchangers on bestchange.com for PM as well, all of the ones listed have been reviewed I believe. But make sure that you do your research before you use one that you haven't heard of before to see that they're still legit.

You could also go with trading on p2p platforms like localbitcoins and paxful, you're likely to get similar rates to what you would get on these instant exchangers, perhaps a little bit better. Since you are covered by escrow you don't need to worry about scammers (but still deal with highly reputable dealers only).

I would avoid KYC as much as possible because a)it's a hassle to go through and b)you don't know where that information is going to go to.

I actually see a lot of exchanges that are asking for more KYC than what is probably necessary, some exchanges have even asked for sources of funds information in addition to just verifying someone's identity, and even income details. We've also seen exchanges have no proof of suspecting any wrongdoing but asking for KYC anyways, potentially to delay withdrawals.

Think about it, who would be held responsible if your information was abused? And would you ever know who did it if you gave KYC information across a variety of platforms?

Unfortunately though if you are trading any sort of significant volume these days, exchanges are bound to ask you for your personal info. There is pretty much no way around that.

You run the risk of getting your account frozen, even if there hasn't been precedents of this happening because they could always cite that in their ToS. It's a bit like Paypal in terms of you may not get banned now, but eventually, your account will get limited.

I'd suggest not even bothering with it. You could try P2P but that would mean that your rates will be significantly worse than using a bigger, regulated exchange.

And even though there is pretty much no way for Payoneer to tell that it came from a bitcoin sale, there is still a remote possibility that the account sending the funds may be flagged somehow as a crypto related account. I honestly would be avoiding doing it, especially if the Payoneer account is of significance to you/your business.

I personally think that this rise was inevitable.

Markets have been bearish for way too long for it to be sustained, and there seems to be a possibility that the bottom was at $3k or so. When markets do go for years without any activity there will eventually be a point where prices will rebound due to demand for cheap coins, and I believe that this was what happened. There may be other micro factors such as individual pieces of news that have been catalysts to this bull rally, but I think that the macro factor of a bottom and trend reversal was the most important.

Is it temporary? I think it probably is, and prices may correct in the short run again. But I do think that a longer lasting recovery will come sooner or later.

Bitcoin already breached $4k at one point.

I agree with the fact that the markets are still bearish, and that I expect prices to correct in the short term soon since there simply isn't enough evidence to call this a bullish breakout yet. But I do think that there is a high likelihood that we will get to $4k within this stretch of rallies.

I doubt that looking at gold is a valid comparison since bitcoin has historically not really shown any tangible link to gold price, and I actually think that the fundamentals and potential of bitcoin is much better than gold at the moment. Also, short term price is mostly dictated by the emotions of the market, and I think that there may already be some element of FOMO in this rally already.

What a joke of a policy.

There is absolutely zero enforceability. Sure, you could potentially stop some big corporates from transacting in bitcoin without paying this 15% tariff, but how are you going to stop individuals conducting bitcoin transaction on a p2p basis? That aspect of it simply makes no sense to me.

Also, I assume that this policy will also apply to Petro as well, which means that essentially they are discouraging people from using the Petro. Who is going to use the Petro when every payment carries a 15% premium and there are better decentralised alternatives instead which the government can't enforce. This is completely unfair, but honestly not out of the ordinary for Venezuela.

I don't think it'll just be something that will occur in Italy. A recession in one country (perhaps not in this case) could trigger recessions in other countries too.

A recession is due any time. We just don't know when we'll see that consecutive quarters of negative growth. We also don't know the government policies around the world for different countries, how they are going to potentially inject liquidity into the market in order to stimulate the economy. That's why it's pretty much impossible for us to predict which country is going to get hit next, and when.

But people are expecting it around the world, economic analysts are predicting it. We are seeing a rebound in the stock sector, but will that last? Since it's impossible to predict when it's going to happen, I'd rather be safe at this stage, diversify out of stocks and real estate to some decentralised assets (gold, silver, crypto) and some short term cash holdings.

Yikes. That's a big breach.

All the points that you made are excellent and I think that anyone who is using an exchange should follow them. As you said, I usually don't do KYC unless there is an absolute need to, because of the fact that you never know who your information is going to be shared with, whether it's going breached (even though this breach apparently only involved usernames and passwords). Also, use different passwords each time you sign up to something and keep track of what sites you're signing up to. That way, your other accounts won't be affected when a breach occurs.

However, I wouldn't consider non-custodial exchanges to be failsafe. They are also risky in terms of forcing you to take KYC, but they do give your funds instantly if the transaction does go smoothly. As long as no funds are stored on an exchange for an extended period of time, usually there are no issues.

I think that monetary losses on Coinmama's end are inevitable, even though they may not be reported now. I doubt the attacker only wants to sell the information when he can get much more from hacking into the accounts and withdrawing. Hopefully Coinmama is taking appropriate action.

Doubt that a VPN is going to help when an account is already flagged as coming from one of the restricted countries.

It seems like that Binance is really becoming extremely tight when it comes to compliance now, and it as expected since they simply weren't going to last as an exchange if they continued to offer pseudo-anonymous accounts with a 2 BTC daily withdrawal limit (which is way more than what most people need).

And yes, I've heard people being randomly flagged for KYC without hitting the 2 BTC withdrawal on another thread. So that is no hoax, it seems. If you're in one of the countries that are newly banned and Binance is letting you withdraw and close your account - do that. If they're asking you to verify, you pretty much have no option but to do that either if you have a balance with them. Don't try to bypass this with VPN (even if it may work).

The amounts involved are significantly less than what I was expecting. They also apparently used an intermediary to process the payments. It seems like this was more of a test than anything important.

I still believe that there is a ton of potential which is recognised by the bitcoin community, and trading internationally on a corporate level is definitely one of them. You essentially get rid of all the currency exchange fees, it's instant and a lot more convenient, and thus, exchange rate risk can be better managed (since a business can convert it into fiat as soon as they receive the payment)

Yet, BTC isn't being utilised in this way, at least yet. I think that the next bull market could be the catalyst to these things actually happening, but no one knows for sure.

It's interesting. I've been expecting this type of FOMO as well, but haven't expected it to come this early.

It's hard to tell exactly how much the markets are going to go up to when the recovery actually happens. To me, there is a pretty big possibility that bitcoin will in fact see consistent double digit growth on a daily basis with occasional dips just as we saw with the last bull market. Especially with large institutions in the market now, I think that players are more ready to buy upon signals issued by some of these institutions, even though they may be completely unbased.

Personally, even though it seems like there has been a trend reversal, I don't believe that the bull market currently can be said to be confirmed. Also, I don't think that this type of growth from FOMO will be sustainable. There will come a time that the market does stop FOMO'ing, and that is going to affect those who buy into the hype.

I wouldn't go out of my way to accumulate bitcoin right now.

The fact is that BTC has pretty much gone up by 20% in a span of less an a month, and the $4k resistance is still yet to be breached. I'm not saying that buying bitcoin right now won't be a good long term investment (after all, it's still under $4k). I'm just saying that I think there is a possibility that we still see some dips in the short term after this rally passes, because we are not out of the bear market yet.

I'd stick to whatever accumulation strategy that I was going with before this pump, no more and no less. For me this was dollar cost averaging. For me right now is still a time of buying patiently, not buying with all your assets in one go.

Exactly. And even though it seems like in the article that merchants aren't directly affected, they most likely will since there is no way these intermediary businesses don't pass on the fees to the actual buyers/sellers.

They seem to be attributing the hike in fees in anti-fraud measures (aka chargebacks, credit card fraud), when you simply don't see that being necessary in decentralised cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, since it is not reversible and no one can physically "skim" your data as easily as a card.

It really goes to show the flaws of a cashless society as you said. It will be interesting to see if governments start their own electronic payment system, instead of relying on third parties, in order to go cashless. But imo centralised cashlessness has just too many detriments, including cost, maintenance, security concerns, and privacy concerns for it to be worthwhile to consider.

To be honest, they probably won't own a lot of actual bitcoins.

I suspect that when the next big bull market swings around and many of the existing institutional investors that has entered the bitcoin market during this bearish stretch actually puts their plans into action, they will be dealing more so with bitcoin derivatives than actual bitcoins.

This is simply because most of these institutions aren't really interested in bitcoin as a technology, but rather bitcoin as an investment. And derivatives, ETFs etc. allows them to achieve better returns with leverage (theoretically) in a bull market, and is more convenient for them than having to set up a whole infrastructure for holding BTC. Does that mean they will hold absolutely 0 bitcoin? No. But I think the ratio of their holdings of bitcoin financial products to actual BTC will be significantly higher than what people expect.