It surprises me that it took this long for them to come up with these measures. Coinbase was an open service that allowed people to deposit and withdrawal at any time without any questions asked.

I have been using Coinbase in all freedom for quite some time and that's over now. Maybe it's a good thing with how it forces people to take care of their own storage from now on.

I'm however glad that Coinbase isn't total shit like Poloniex and Bittrex. Coinbase grants people to opportunity to withdraw their digital assets before people are either kicked out or forced to verify.

Poloniex and Bittrex seize your funds and don't release them until you verify yourself.

It could, but it would need to be spent on things not requiring any form of registration and whatnot. I don't really mind it at this point, I'll figure something out later on when the time is right.

I don't rely on forks. I genuinely keep my coins offline for the purpose of building up wealth in Bitcoin and having money that can't be seized. Forks are nothing more than an annoyance to be honest.

People think it's free money, but they don't realize that cashing out fork coins means that you are pretty much signalling that you have an equal amount of Bitcoin that has been hidden for many years.

What is that for nonsense? If even professional traders openly admit that it isn't possible to make profit in a sustainable manner, how do you expect people here to be capable of that?

Day trading is gambling. The only thing you hope for is that you end your trading session with a profit, and as stated before, that's not possible all the time. If trading was really as easy as you make it look like, we all would be trading our asses off.

Why can't people not simply be happy with long term hodling? If you're not sure about when to buy, then stick to dollar cost averaging, which is the most noob friendly way of entering a market.

Well programmed bots are far more capable of manipulation than people themselves are, and that by orders of magnitude. In most cases it's even less obvious than when manipulation happens manually.

Most institutions use a wide variety of bots each targeting a specific aspect of the market they are working on. Bot manipulation goes way further than simply buying up the price and then dump the price down.

The average user occasionally buying and selling crypto isn't affected this manipulation at all, more so the cowboys thinking that trading is an easy way to profit, but that's what they have to accept when trading crypto.

Don't want to be subject to manipulation? Don't trade.

The worst thing that can happen is that ETFs turn out to not generate worthwhile demand. I would say that futures markets are more of a negative factor than ETFs with how they make it a whole lot easier to short Bitcoin.

Crypto's worst enemy is speculation. If we can't take off its speculative jacket and focus on actual use, what's it worth? You can't endlessly keep expecting crypto to take over at some point.

If after 2020 we still haven't seen an improvement in that aspect, when will we? What has actually changed since Bitcoin's genesis block was created? We're exactly there where we started, it's just the price that has gone up.

People need to grow up and stop thinking that crypto goes up in one straight line for ever. Everything that goes up hard comes down hard, especially when it's based on pure hype, which it was last year.

Who's fault is it that people buy near the peak? Who's fault is it that people invest with borrowed money? People need to rethink their actions and for once acknowledge that it's not crypto that should be blamed for their failure.

People went nuts on crypto by using credit last year, which explains why several banks have blocked crypto purchases with credit. I don't even blame them with how people don't understand what risks they expose themselves to.

Rule nr1: don't speculate with money that isn't yours.

Could be, but the fact that there is too much fiat in circulation might be playing an important role in how the stock market bubble may last much longer than we think, which is why I wouldn't be surprised to see it go up more.

When the bubble finally pops, you can be sure that the bear market will last several years with how slow the legacy market cycles through its phases. The next question will be where all that capital will shift to.

It could be that crypto will directly benefit from a stock market pop. If even 10% of that capital ends up in the crypto market, we'll see an institutional driven bull run that makes the previous retail bull runs look like a joke.

I share your thoughts. I rather see the government continue to maintain a safe distance between itself and crypto currencies in general. The further they dig into crypto, the more they eventually will break. Everything they touch is doomed.

Fiat in its current form isn't all that bad. I use both fiat and Bitcoin to conduct transactions, and it works incredibly well. Why do we need to use Bitcoin for everything? Bitcoin won't ever be able to match fiat money completely.

The more money options we have, the more we'll be able to avoid being bullied by whatever form of censorship. I see how people here hope that fiat will implode, but they don't know that they will implode as well when that happens.

It's not the first time we have seen the price be this stable. Back in 2015 the price needed what looked like an eternity to break through the $300 mark, and it might very well be similar right now.

Manipulation adapts to what the situation is, and with how you don't need extreme volatility to profit from leveraged trades, manipulation is more under the radar than most people think.

Regulators don't really care about volatility. It's more so that they don't know what to do with this market, especially when you take into consideration that there is more to lose than to gain for them.

Same here. I was shocked to see how far altcoins were bought up during the peak of the bull run. It made me as Bitcoiner look like an idiot with how I was talking about how bad of an investment they are.

The market as a whole looks a bit more healthy right now, especially when it comes to altcoin valuations. We have to accept that they won't be going anywhere, and that during the next bull run they'll go up like mad again.

That directly makes me wonder, can we really blame old farts as Warren Buffett for trashing the crypto market? I too believe that it's not that far away from being utter shit for the most part.

That's where a lot people go wrong, especially when it comes to altcoins. It's impossible to say whether or not the price of an altcoin is low, regardless of how much it has gone down prior to that.

People kept saying that Bitcoin at $15,000 was low and for that reason a solid dip to buy. Then it was $10,000 where people thought that it wouldn't fall below that psychologically important barrier, but it did.

With crypto you should be ready to see prices tank up to 90% from their highs, especially when it comes to altcoins. People thinking that prices are low because they went down with 50% already will be burned hard.

50% down will turn into 70% down and soon after 90% down.

It may be a safer way to invest, but not the most convenient and profitable way. It's far more profitable if you invest directly in crypto itself rather than something that's built around it.

In all the years there hasn't been one single investment option that yielded more than simply investing in crypto. I don't understand why people keep going back to mining as if it is something worthy of your time and money.

By the time you made 75% of your money back with mining whatever altcoin, the price of that coin has probably doubled or tripled in value already. There is enough historical evidence to back up that claim.

Talking about gold perfectly makes sense considering how it is a widely accepted safe haven asset, just like crypto is during an economical crisis. In other words, you agree with something you don't understand.

Large parties will always prefer gold over crypto during economical difficulties for the reasons I pointed out in my previous post. Other than a minor allocation to Bitcoin can we not expect from institutions.

To add, do they really need a blockchain? The more I read into what a database really is, the more I believe that we are hyping up something that's not solving a real world problem when it comes to the corporate world.

I think his motivation behind Bitcoin is as clear as it can be, which is to provide an alternative to everything that's centralized and permission based in form of peer to peer transactions. Pretty valid motivation if you ask me.

It's also not a surprise that Bitcoin popped up during the credit crisis back in 2008/2009. I am even of believe that satoshi wasn't planning to go 'public' that soon, but used the crisis as stimulating factor, and it really was.

I honestly don't even want to know who satoshi is. I can only say that I'm thankful that we have a working tool that's meant to bring in more economical freedom for basically everyone, and we're still at the very beginning.

If the market cycles repeat, which is more than likely, the next major bull run will push the price through the $100,000 mark. It's however hard to imagine right now without Bitcoin scaling properly.

I keep thinking about last year's bull run and how it caused the network fees to increase so much, that Bitcoin wasn't longer usable for people dealing with $50/$100 amounts. The higest fee I paid last year was $40ish which is crazy.

That's why I strongly hope that there won't be another bull run any time soon. Sure, more SegWit adoption helps, but it hasn't seen much of a boost at all with how SegWit usage still hovers well below 50%.

That's what I keep hearing for months. Do you mind that there isn't much value to add to such statements? People will keep saying that till the moment they are actually right, and it will happen eventually, but that's not knowledge.

Even a broken clock is right at least twice a day. Maybe that's what inspired Tom Lee to stick to his end of the year prediction, but it seems that he's slowly lowering his optimistic tone to match current market sentiment.

I have been following his stock market analysis as well, and even there he's not doing that great. I feel bad for him with how he's just trying to provide worthwhile market information, but when you're wrong that often, people will notice that.

What's the point of starting with penny stocks when most crypto currencies that people can trade here are just as speculative and worthless? It's even a waste of time in my opinion.

Technically speaking, short term minded traders don't and shouldn't care about what they trade, it's all about catching the opportunities that the volatility in a specific market offers, and crypto is more than perfect for that.

If one coin is slowing down, then you simply go to the next one. There is no shortage of coins offering volatility, not even during the current bear market. You learn by diving in the crypto market, not by trading stocks first.

Every beginner loses with trading initially, even with stocks.

May I ask how long ago it is that you contacted support? In some cases it's "normal" that it takes a couple of days before they respond to your tickets, so have a little more patience.

Also, has there been any suspicious activity (think about trades or withdrawals you didn't execute) on your account? It may help to provide more details that may steer us into a certain direction.

That may seem like a good option, but it really isn't. The more emails you send to an exchange or service, the more likely it is that they will mark you as a spammer. In other words, you only harm yourself by doing that.

Goes way too far. People are too easily triggered by these events, which is a bit pathetic to be honest. If you don't like a service, don't use it. It's not that Shapeshift did any harm to their users. It's forced upon them by the authorities.

As long as they can offer the convenience they are known for, they will eventually continue to grow after a short term dip due to their KYC requirements. All it requires is another crypto boom to attract a new group of users.

People easily hand over their private information to ICOs and whatnot, so I'm sure they won't make a problem out of Shapeshift's KYC requirements as genuine service. They'll recover for sure, no doubt about that.

The difficulty won't really decrease because when smaller miners stop mining, the larger miners immediately fire up more of their own hardware to benefit. It's quite a competitive aspect of crypto where only the strongest survive.

Some larger miners even intentionally fire up more hardware in an attempt to make smaller miners quit. Smaller miners will try to keep mining as long as possible, even when it isn't all that profitable in the short term.

You have to keep in mind that turning off hardware isn't an option with how the difficulty won't be going down. The only thing you're doing in that case is granting other miners more profits, and your position in the network is gone.