It's not good to make stores feel bad, because it will work against Bitcoin rather than for Bitcoin. Hyping up Bitcoin too much in an attempt to have them accept it as form of payment isn't good either, because the lack of actual use will make you look bad because the sales in Bitcoin will heavily disappoint, especially during bear markets where most people lick their wounds.

Be realistic, help store owners where they need it, and more importantly, spend Bitcoin yourself over at their store as well. Coingate allows merchants to accept Lightning payments, so definitely a plus there. Everyone likes fast and cheap settling transactions. It might even have geeks visit their stores just for the sake of paying with Lightning.

Exactly. Institutions know how to play a market, and they know that these are the times you should be loading up on coins. Retail "investors" aka gamblers mostly buy at the wrong time, and sell at the wrong time, and they have been selling like mad in the last couple of weeks, and they'll regret having done so for sure.

Buy when there's blood on the street and sell when idiots are celebrating prices reaching all time highs. Every Bitcoiner or smart investor has seen its BTC holdings significantly increase on the way down this year. If not, you haven't been paying attention to how cyclic this market is.

The cycles we're going through aren't necessarily helping to have a fairer distribution in wealth, but we aren't in a position to expect anything like that to happen with how stupid the mass is. Smart money will always have that advantage.

It's not a whale, but solely Coinbase performing maintenance that will result in a better (i.e. more secure) distribution of coins, and probably also to claim the fork coins.

https://blog.coinbase.com/notice-of-blockchain-movements-b09cb1ec46dd

I'm quite shocked that they hold that many coins. It's crazy if you think about it, because this just shows how much 'faith' people have in Coinbase, a centralized entity. I get it, it's one of the most compliant exchanges, but that doesn't mean it won't ever mess up one way or another.

I do however like how they used Segwit to save up on fees, which perfectly demonstrates how they acknowledge its usefulness.

If something has proven to show its strength and durability in the first decade, it will very likely follow the exact same route in the next decade. Back in pre 2015-2016 times it was understandable that people had something like 'it will either succeed or become obsolete' because there was little to hold on to in terms of fundamentals.

We're way ahead of that right now and see that institutions are building up a basis layer at which they will be able to further institutionalize this space. If Bitcoin was shit and had no future perspective, institutions wouldn't be working hard to make the ecosystem around it more liquid and become an easy to access asset class for other institutions.

Bull runs attract tons of new participants, and if we have a couple of more to go throug as pointed out by him, it makes it even less likely to see Bitcoin go away.

I'm more worried about the Euro to be dead in the long term than Bitcoin itself. Heck, I'm sure that even Litecoin will outlast the Euro.

Not sure if that's something to look forward to. In most cases capital shifts from asset to asset, and if Bitcoin isn't differentiating itself enough, it will implode just as hard as stocks and other assets will implode when they're no longer seen as a worthy option. Use is the most important aspect for Bitcoin, because use as money is eventually what will make sure that Bitcoins circulate instead of float around in the speculative market.

Altcoins unfortunately come and go. By the time we finally see the current generation altcoins be 'exterminated', there is a newer generation altcoins taking over their place. The almost decade worth of history we have in the market has proven exactly that.

Same here, but wash trading won't ever be exterminated completely. It happens in every market. The difference is that crypto is such a kindergarten, that no one even cares to put effort into hiding how much wash trading activity there is here. In stock markets it's done by institutions using proxies, which makes it way harder for any regulator to figure out what's happening.

It's really the smart (stock) market versus the dumb (crypto) market. We're dealing with amateurs here. The professional guys have been doing this for decades and know how to conveniently make their trades look as organic as possible. If we can point at certain exchanges for being wash trading candidates, regulators won't have much of a problem with it either, especially if they pull out their big guns and actively start to raid these exchanges.

The only thing I aim for, which is something you can't pinpoint a date for, is to have Bitcoin become a globally accepted medium of exchange with a decent level of price stability. I want to disconnect myself entirely from the banking system and have all my income streams be solely in Bitcoin. I don't need a bank. I'm anti debt and have never taken out a loan and never will. If I can't afford something, I simply don't buy it.

Gold was always pointed at to be a perfect currency, which it clearly isn't, well, Bitcoin is taking over where Gold just couldn't serve up to its purpose anymore.

Weekly payments worked fine since the very beginning of this campaign and they will continue to work fine. It's not DarkStar's problem if you don't have much time to post during certain time frames. Bi weekly payments will translate into more rushed (i.e. lower quality) posts because people have more incentive to make up for their "missed" payments in the second week.

In the end, it's a signature campaign, not a job. You aren't "missing" out on anything if you post less. You are being paid for something you do anyway, which is posting, regardless of the frequency.

Bitfinex is a horrible exchange and has been for quite a while now. I wouldn't trust anything coming from that exchange, especially with how they are notoriously spoofing their orderbooks with large fake buy walls (that they withdraw as soon as they notice someone is about to dump into them) to make it seem like there is a lot going on, while in reality it's quite disappointingly boring.

It's not a list consisting of which exchange are the best of the best, but a list consisting of exchanges of who's the least worst of the worst.

Binance is the only decent exchange in the list. Unregulated, but still decent.

I'm seeing quite a positive sentiment developing around LN and people actually start to appreciate what it delivers so far. It requires some smoothening left and right when it concerns payment routing, but I'm sure this is just a matter of time, especially when there are more well funded/connected channels available.

In the end, if it starts doing what it should be doing, it wouldn't be a crazy thing if one or more large social media platforms incorporate LN. It allows people to tip friends, have them bet against each other by playing games, pay for media consumption, etc. Content creation is a big deal on platforms outside of youtube due their harsh restrictions.

We're just one spark away from mass adoption essentially. It might not be around the corner right now, but we'll be there eventually.

Huobi can't even provide basic level customer support in understandable English, so you can bet your left sock that they will provide horrible customer support over in Russia.

No one gives a damn about them in this market, and I'm not even sure if they ever positively contributed to crypto in general. We shouldn't forget that this was one of the exchanges literally terrorizing the Chinese market back then by allowing HF traders to squeeze out every penny of people. It was a massive shitshow where people were tricked into thinking Chinese exchanges were such a big deal because of their volumes.

Less Huobi = better for this market, the same applies to their friends over at OKEx. Rubbish.

It's all related to shitty on-exchange bonus structures switching from coin to coin. It shows that Bithumb today has generated 98% of all BTG volume, which is completely retarded. Asian exchanges also like to mess around with transaction fee mining which stimulates people to intensively wash trade just to make a few pennies.

I only pay attention to exchanges such as Coinbase Pro, Kraken, Bitstamp and Gemini because these are legit fiat entry and exit points with traders thinking twice before attempting to generate tons of fake volumes. Exchanges such as Bithumb and all the other shithole exchanges such as DobiTrade and ZB are an absolute disgrace to this space.

Every so often you see a brand new Asian exchange pop generating hundreds of millions in volume. They aren't even trying to hide malicious activity.

It's strictly luck indeed. I wonder how many of those who "accurately" predicted the bull run have put their money where their mouth is. I'm afraid only a very few, and if so, very likely a tiny amount. Richard Heart is exactly like that. He brags about how he predicted the $20,000 peak but yet ended almost in tears when thinking about how much him being a Bitcoin maximalist made him "lose out" on altcoin gains.

If you are so sure of yourself that Bitcoin will pump to $20,000, you can safely assume that altcoins will pump even harder. The funniest part is that he gets all emotional about some gains he could have scooped up, while he claims to be a billionaire.

If that's the case, then we'll be back to square one as soon as these public figures talk crap about Bitcoin, because if people take the positive talk for granted without thinking, they'll do so too when it's not so positive. It's not a good basis and will translate into getting rekkt eventually.

I'm however glad that more and more people start to look into the fundamentals and what LN actually is. Some of them even went ahead and played with it and ordered physical plug-and-play nodes. Based on that I'm a little bit more optimistic about who we are dealing with here, and that there is actual interest in the fundamentals from people other than the hardcore Bitcoiners.

Time is all we need, and currently we have that time, and plenty of it. It's as always people rushing to see that adoption take place.

Why do people think Bitcoin has to replace fiat currencies? It's a twisted way of thinking, because there is more than enough room in the world for different sorts of money to exist. Governments are out to exterminate competition, the last thing we should do is follow them, because that makes everyone here just as bad.

Sickfucks such as Craigh Wright would be up for it, I'm sure, otherwise they wouldn't be teaming up in an attempt to kill off competing crypto currencies by attacking their chain and mining empty blocks. Not sure to what extent these plans were ever viable for them, but even thinking of doing something like that indicates that we're dealing with toxic entities.

In the end, the US dollar won't be killed off by a competing form of money, but will be killed off by itself because fiat currencies have a limited shelf life.

The funny thing is that last year on the way up I expected nearly every round price level (e.g. $3000, $4000, $5000, etc) to be the peak at which the market would correct, but it kept going up like crazy. This year we have seen the exact opposite; every level people considered to be where the bottom would be at, it broke through almost every level effortlessly.

People right now act like 'you should have sold last year' while they fail to realize that it could have gone to $30-$50,000 just as easily. Basic market logic is that you don't short that what's going up with the momentum behind it to back it. Asia peaked at like $26,000 so it wasn't even that crazy to think about $50,000 levels. It was 'just' one doubling from there.

Bitcoin adoption is adoption out of free will. You can choose to not adopt it and it's all fine, which means that the adoption taking place will automatically take way more time to grow. The Euro was forced upon people, and an added benefit for governments was that it burns through the wealth that we all managed to build up throughout the last decades.

The worst thing is that the Euro has shown signs of failure in the very early stage of the 'rollout' and I expect it to implode in the forthcoming years.

Back in 2013 I was buying Bitcoin at an exchange rate of €1 = ~$1.4 and it has fallen well below $1.10 more than once already. If that isn't a bad sign, then I don't know what is.

Roger uploaded a video yesterday expressing how happy he is that Gemini added BCash to their platform alongside BTC, Ethereum, ZCash and one other coin. The other coin he seems to be disgusted with is Litecoin. It doesn't even surprise me, it's faster, cheaper to use, has more on-chain transaction activity, and has surpassed BCash in terms of market cap. Perfect way to ruin his day.

More importantly, if BitPay continues to be as crooked as it is today, it won't be here anymore when that mass adoption happens. Their lack of will to adopt Segwit and LN will be their downfall. That's what happens when you work against Bitcoin.

It's not necessarily related to ragging on Bitcoin, it's just a headline focused on attracting the most possible clicks, and this is the way to go. It wouldn't even surprise me if these headlines have been exaggerated to fit the current sentiment of the market, while in a more bullish market it would be a less stressing headline.

It happens throughout the whole internet, it's largely a matter of targetting the right audience by adjusting the headlines to what the latest sentiment is.

I'm more surprised by how people are still surprised that this is happening.

You are proven wrong already. Bitcoin has processed over $2 trillion worth of transactions this year. Most of it is likely due to speculation, but still, the network has processed that much in value, which is the most important metric to focus on. I expect this trend to continue and we'll likely break $3 trillion next year, or the year after.

LN will eventually process a fair amount of transactional value as well, so we can look forward to even more growth in that field. We already have wiped PayPal & Co off the table in terms of transactional value, and remember that we're still just starting up.