Can confirm, the same happened to me right now. I deposited a small amount of ECASH to test the waters, as I haven't used YoBit before. So far they forwarded it to another address, but have not credited my account. I guess that explains why no one is selling into the ECASH pump right now.

Any news from your side, OP?

It honestly comes to little suprise, as even the reports themselves were mostly talking about regulation unlike what some of the headlines implied. Would have made for less exciting news though, I suppose.




I think it's safe to say that Bitcoiners have learned to take FUD with a huge grain of salt nowadays. It also helped that when China actually did shut down exchanges, it merely lead to a short term price fluctuation. Bitcoin is growing more resilient every day.

Word of advise: Even if a cloud mining company is not out to scam you, the mining contract will likely never make a profit. Maybe in terms of fiat, because of rising crypto valuations, but not in terms of whatever cryptocurrency you are trying to mine. You're better off simply buying and holding.

That would be merely an airdrop, the answer by achow101 is the correct one.

While one may argue that the result is mostly the same, hardforks are still usually deployed by having nodes follow the canonical Bitcoin consensus until a certain block is reached, after which a protocol change and subsequently the hardfork is triggered. Sometimes successfully, such as was the case with BCH despite a slow startup, sometimes not so successfully, as was the case with B2X that stopped working due to a bug in the forking logic.

In general I would argue that cryptocurrencies could be seen as a "belief system" in that most of them strive to achieve certain values that are usually not ascribed to money, such as indepence, privacy and censorship-resistance. Especially the latter seems to be a rather curious aspect to most people, as usually there's little thought spent on how money is not as free to move as one is led to believe.

Regarding Jamie Dimon however, I guess he just doesn't want to end up being the guy that said "the internet is a fad". The focus on the turn of phrase is likely due to the fact that the term blockchain has for the most part become devoid of actual meaning, making it an empty hull that could mean anything you make it out to be. It follows that the discourse becomes more a matter of "faith" than of meaningful arguments.

Short- to mid-term things might start to look grim, but the other coins either scale just as bad or are centralized, so I'm not worried. Well, the latter does worry me a bit, because if centralized tokens were to win the race it would mean that the experiment that is cryptocurrencies has largely failed, which would be a shame.

I think that pretty much breaks it down. Everyone and their dogs has heard of Bitcoin by now. Alt coiners and cryptocurrency "experts" are all over the place. Blockchain hype is as big as it has ever been.

Nonetheless the actual usage of cryptocurrencies is still in a very early stage. So adoption is far from mainstream.

As far as usage for speculation is concerned, I'd say Bitcoin is beginning to become mainstream though.


I would define Bitcoin to be mainstream once everyone and their dogs has not only heard of Bitcoin, but owns or uses it. Keep in mind that the internet had also reached mainstream awareness long before mainstream adoption.

Byteball (GBYTE) has Blackbytes, which is the supposedly anonymous counterpart to their Bytes token. As far as I know they are not traded on any centralized exchanges though, only on community channels.

According to blockchain.info there's currently just short of 300,000 BTC transactions being handled per day, with roughly 160,000 BTC transactions being stuck in the mempool. If someone flipped a switch and all of a sudden 90% of transaction were to be SegWit transactions, close to doubling the current possible transaction throughput, those stuck transactions were gone within a day and every transaction that followed would have little trouble getting confirmed, even with a low fee. In 2015 miners earned only about a 1/50 in transactions fees of what they earn today, so my educated guess would be that transaction fees would be only 1/50 of what they are today.

Keep in mind however that even with 90% segwit adoption, given the current growth of transactions, we'd be looking at the same problem again in about 2-3 years time. So scaling solutions such as Lightning Network are required in the long term.



In theory you could use Lightning Network without SegWit, given a transaction malleability fix. In practice, such a fix currently only exists with SegWit, so right now SegWit is required for Lightning transactions.

Do yourself a favour and do your own research. Look at the top coins on coinmarketcap by market cap and volume and look at each respective's coin's use case, technical approach and community. Keep in mind that some coins are centrally issued, which may be good or bad depending on how you want to look at it. Form your own opinion and don't just blindly buy into the hype of the day.



No such thing as a safe bet in crypto.

The interesting part will be to see whether one of the alts manages to decouple itself from BTC, which I don't quite see happening yet.

Most alts still get pulled down when BTC drops. ETH decouples at times, but still mostly follows BTC's movement. BCH only decouples during hype events, but for the most part still seems to follow BTC's market trend. XRP looks mostly like a short-term trend right now, but who knows. It's going to be a decisive year for crypto in general either way.

Something can have an intrinsic value and still be part of a bubble. Housing, for example. Or even dot com companies.

It's only when the prices that people are willing to pay far exceed the fundamental value of an asset, that bubbles are born.

I agree with your sentiment though. Cryptocurrencies as a technology are an unprecedented value proposition that in the long run will not be lessened by price fluctuations.

Lack of arbitrage options has indeed been a problem with Korean exchanges. I wasn't aware of them having 0 fees though, very reminiscent of China, if true. And worrying for the short- to mid-term future of crypto prices, as Korean exchanges seem to have become a driving factor during the last few months.

In this case I'd give Lightning a run on testnet first

A few starting points:

1) HTLC.me web wallet
2) Eclair testnet android wallet
3) Lightning Desktop App ( https://github.com/lightninglabs/lightning-app/releases )
4) yalls.org for spending testnet microtransactions
5) Starblocks.acinq.co for spending testnet microtransactions

1) and 2) are easiest to get into, but rather limited in functionality.
3) Seems to be fully fledged, but I had connectivity problems when trying to open a direct channel. Might have been a firewall issue though, since it was not my home network when I first gave it a try.
4) yalls works great so far
5) starblocks had connectivity issues last I tried

I'm sure there's more, but that's how I personally got started.

Assuming you're thinking about earning Lightning transaction fees: I don't think there will be much of a profit in running a Lightning node, so the amount you want to keep locked in a channel will mostly depend on your actual spending habits. It's still a bit early to tell though.

Honestly? I don't see any reason to believe in an attack on Bitcoin or in a conspiracy theory to keep Bitcoin down. All I see is consolidation in an already overbought market. If anything it makes me wonder how much of the recent growth was organic. Both in regards to BTC and the alt market. I'm still fairly confident about crypto in general, I also see the South Korea headlines mostly as FUD, but a conspiracy? Nah...

My personal prediction, that will likely be false on all accounts:

1) BTC will stay above USD 10,000,-, it might be a close call though.

2) Alts will see yet another boom, but the growth will be mostly unsustainable. We'll see changes in the top coins as some currently hyped alts fall from grace and get superseded by others.

3) BTC will come close to USD 50,000,- at one point in 2018, but not be able to stabilize on that level.

When BTC falls, it takes the whole crypto market down with it. You may catch a lucky break and happen to find an alt that fares better than the others, but which one it will be -- if there is one -- is anyone's guess.

I agree with you. It seems like coinmarketcap saw the writing on the wall and acted accordingly.

However while I see some Korean exchanges being forced to close, I'm still doubtful about South Korea stopping crypto trade altogether.

It's current news, but arguably it's more a question of regulation, rather than banning:

https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-southkorea-bitcoin/south-korea-plans-to-ban-cryptocurrency-trading-rattles-market-idUSKBN1F002A

Whether it's the cause of the current drop is speculative, of course, as given the current market situation a further drop in BTC price was not unexpected. The drop in BTC precedes the current rise of alt coins though, so the drop seems to be the cause of the rise and not the other way round.