I'd have to disagree with this. Bitcoin's long term success does not depend on a single's person's opinion, regardless of how influential that person is. That's the beauty of decentralisation, in my opinion. If anything, this news will only spark short term hype within the market, and when people realise that this really has no tangible benefits, then that hype will die down.

Also, I share the doubts of other users in terms of whether this statement will lead to any positive regulation. To me, it would be very unlikely to see this ever happen.

But I mean, he is absolutely right in saying that bitcoin's not manipulable. And that's the exact reason why people invest in it, long term. It's not subject to the imminent depreciation of fiat currencies, nor is it as cumbersome and inconvenient as other safe haven assets like precious metals. I'm just not sure whether this is actually news worth reporting though, given that it's a statement he made 2 years ago.

I honestly think that this is a bull trap.

You might see a few short term cycles of oscillating prices between $3k-5k, but I don't think that it's going to go above this range at the moment. Compared to the last bear markets, there is still quite some time to go before the time elapsed from the 2017 ATH matches the time taken for the recovery from the 2015 bear market to occur.

Prices have corrected quite a bit today, and it seems like that even $4k is posing significant resistance. My strategy right now is still accumulating, since I have always believed that anything below $6k is worthwhile to do dollar cost averaging on. I wouldn't bother trading the short term price fluctuations, if your end goal is to hold for the long run.

That's why I don't place any trust in the fiat system. It's solely based on debt, and people's willingness to take out loans.

I don't think this marks a healthy economy even if it appears to be growing, because most of the time, it is just fueled by cheap credit that is available at any bank. It's also why financial crises happen so easily, a default can trigger many others.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think that this figure even covers all debt (only national debt). That just shows how crazy things are.

Bitcoin offers a safe haven which is decentralised, and completely independent from this debt based system, which is the reason why I do believe in it for the long run. You just can't borrow more bitcoins into existence.

Ah damn... That's unlucky, man. My advice for when you deal in the future would be to:

a) Always check the person's reputation, including untrusted feedback. If there is negative reputation or no reputation at all, then be extremely cautious. Research any email addresses, social media, and bitcoin addresses that are associated with the account to see if there are any previous connections with other scams.
b) Use escrow in all scenarios unless you are willing to lose the amount you send.
c) Try not to pay with gift card, because it can be hard to prove who exactly took out the funds. A scammer could easily take funds out of your gift card, claim that it has been emptied, and refuse to give you your goods.

If you did all of the above within this scam, you would have easily saved yourself your money. I understand that $25 isn't necessarily a whole lot, but remember that you're also giving the scammer income, no matter how little you lose.

There has certainly been a huge decrease in faucets/micro earnings sites that pay in BTC, and I expect this to continue.

This is probably due to a combination of the fact that people are realising that faucets are nothing more than glorified PTC sweatshops that pay extremely little for views on their ad, as well as the fact that mainstream engagement during this bearish stretch has been low, who are the main users of these faucets.

Apart from faucets, I agree with the statement that cloud mining sites are going to go out of business. They investment packages that they offer are just no longer going to be profitable, and we've already seen a lot of Hashflare users that have gotten their contracts terminated. It's not going to be a pretty end, though. I expect a lot to exit scam in this market.

I simply don't understand why people would want to cut loss right now.

Prices are so low, that even if you cut your losses and exit your positions, you wouldn't be getting much back. If you made the mistake of investing at the height of the bubble, there is really nothing you can do other than being patient and holding for the long term.

But it's an obvious exaggeration to say that bitcoin is dead. Its fundamentals has not changed, and we've probably heard that claim a thousand times by now. People confuse price with bitcoin's utility, adoption, and acceptance. Bitcoin's adopter base is not decreasing by any means, nor is its transaction processing capability faltering.

In any circumstance, bitcoin's decentralisation means that even if there is just 1 person using the network, it is not "dead". Thus, it's absurd to say that bitcoin isn't useful anymore simply due to one bear market. It makes zero sense.

I think that 1 and 2 are all very good points. Not sure about 3 though.

It's very likely that we're very close to the bottom right now. I don't think that we have hit bottom yet, even though prices seem to be rebounding at the moment. All I'm saying is that prices probably will not collapse down too much at this point, but rather move sideways with occasional dips.

With the percentage loss from the all time high, I seriously can't see prices going down to $1k or below like others predict simply because historic bear market bottoms have been around 15% of ATH value, and that there will be a ton of demand for BTC if it ever did drop below $3k in my opinion. The fundamentals of bitcoin has not changed, and there's still a lot of people investing for the long term. In my opinion, right now, in this zone between $3-4k is the perfect time to buy in cheap coins if you are able to hold it for the long run.

This is why people shouldn't be stressed about the bear market.

Bitcoin isn't some magical investment that will continue to appreciate in value.

Just like any other asset, it will have its bull markets and bear markets in the short run, and right now we are in the latter. If you do think that long term demand for bitcoin will increase (i.e., more people will start using bitcoin to pay in the future, or at least store their wealth), then these short term price swings shouldn't worry you at all.

As OP said, we see that on average, bear markets take around 1-2 years to recover. I think we are close to the bottom right now, and that it is a good idea to accumulate some coins through dollar cost averaging to enter the market at a low price.

I think this is overall, a very fair judgement on the recent developments in the bitcoin markets.

There was obviously a huge bubble in the year 2017, which is why this bear market has emerged as prices corrected over the last year. But as the article suggested, there is absolutely no cause for concern simply because a bear market is present. All that it means is that short term sentiment will be negative, and that rallies will be rare.

But in terms of long term adoption, and BTC's use in various fields, I honestly do not think that bitcoin will be affected that much at all. Institutions are going to still come in regardless of whether the market is bullish or bearish (perhaps bearish markets present them with even better buying opportunities), and adoption is still going to continue increasing.



Interesting take. I do feel like that in the future, as regulations tighten with crypto to fiat (or vice versa) transactions, people are going to shift to dealing exclusively in crypto. Services/goods will be priced and denominated in crypto, as opposed to pricing in fiat and being paid with crypto.

Nice breakdown of the entire project.

There is simply nothing right about this project. It's got a generic site design, used by many other scams, generic statements on their site that could literally mean anything, and obviously if you spend just a little bit of time researching you will find that their entire site is copy & pasted.

I would not be surprised at all if their two team members were just random pictures gotten off the internet either.

This is why research is so important before you invest. They are making claims that their tokens will be profitable, without backing it up with anything tangible, including any business model. With their ICO currently active, I do hope that people are able to see this thread and back out of investing.

Exactly as stompix said, the volume data is quite misleading.

If you are looking at the volume in fiat terms when the Bolivar is depreciating on a regular basis, of course it is going to seem like that the trading volume is skyrocketing. If you switch over to BTC or even just USD terms, you will find that the trading volume has been relatively stable and has not changed much.

With that said though, it makes sense for Venezuela and Argentina to want to accumulate bitcoin, because of the financial crisis that their countries are being faced with, as well as a debased currency. It's a useful store of value which they can easily access via p2p trading, as opposed to dealing with forex which may be harder. However, it's just not on the scale that this article has exaggerated it to be.

I mean, even Gmail flagged it as suspicious (which is rare for these types of emails), that's how obvious it is. Binance seems to be especially targeted in these phishing emails, due to its popularity.

Most of these scam emails can be spotted a mile away by simply having a long hard look of the sender's email address, confirming that the domain name which the emails are sent from is indeed owned by the legitimate company. There are instances of spoofed email addresses, however, so it is also good to research on google about any claims that the email makes.

If the email offers any type of giveaway that seems too good to be true, disregard it completely. Use your common sense here. No way is an exchange going to be giving away millions of dollars for free, without some sort of a catch.

I don't think that you are doing anything wrong, because there is literally one field that can be used for putting the 2FA code.

As others have said, the only thing you can do right now is to try with different browsers, different IPs, clear your cookies (or use incognito) etc. and see if any of this solves your issue. Also, is there a chance that you have yobit on your google authenticator?

Contact support if you want, but I don't expect them to reply in a long while or assist you in any way. Yobit is a joke of an exchange, which is buggy, has constant deposit/withdrawal issues, with an unresponsive support. I would not recommend using them again, if you were to be able to gain access to your account simply because of their horrendous customer service.

If the screenshots are accurate, he essentially admits that he had stolen the balances of your gift card.

However in this post, the alleged scammer is still trying to sell your gift card for bitcoin. Is there any chance that you can still use the Vanilla gift card before he does (since he is selling the gift card, which means that he may not have drained it yet), or is he attempting to scam with that currency exchange thread as well?

Also, in this thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5079544.msg48424748#msg48424748, he puts down his email of panchito123497@gmail.com, which is linked to an army of accounts used to scam in the past here.

There is pretty much no chance of getting your money back if you can confirmed he'd already used all of the balance in your card. At least it is a small loss, but please, don't deal with newbies without escrow in the future.

Exactly. People argue that stablecoins are better in terms of being a store of value, I honestly think that it's the exact opposite.

Sure, there may be volatility in the short term that comes with bitcoin. However, when you are looking at the long run, the value of bitcoin should hedge against inflation nicely, given that adoption stays around the same or continues increasing (which is very likely), due to the fact that it has a limited figure.

Stablecoins are no different to fiat bank deposits. Even worse, these deposits are not secured by anyone, nor is there solid proof that any reserves are there at all. So there is essentially going to be long term depreciation of any value stored in stablecoins, as well as the risk that a "bank run" may happen, while the stablecoin doesn't have sufficient reserves. At the end of the day, it's an extremely risky economic proposition to me.

I wouldn't say that there is a new era of bitcoin at all.

Bitcoin hasn't changed one single bit in terms of how it operates fundamentally and the benefits that it offers both technically and economically. All that has changed is the price, and that is due to market cycles and psychology that doesn't necessarily affect the bitcoin network.

Thus, the most important thing out of all about bitcoin isn't really its value, but rather adoption figures.

And right now it seems like there is still an increasing amount of adopters, which is somewhat surprising in this bear market, but still shows promise for the future. After all, adoption is what sparks demand in the long term anyways.

I think that actual adoption of bitcoin as a store of value or as a means of transacting will actually occur within countries which have deep rooted financial issues, or crises.

For example, countries such as Venezuela have seen increased adoption for bitcoin, as access to foreign exchange can be extremely difficult and bitcoin essentially provides people with a hedge against inflation. It is this utility that bitcoin has got which makes it valuable in the first place, and it is interesting to see that it is not the developed countries that are taking advantage of this (possibly due to the perceived stability of their respective fiats).

I have no doubt that bitcoin would be able to break into developing markets in the future. One, due to its globalised nature, and two, due to the need for safe haven assets within these countries, and global means of payment that can connect workers within these countries to overseas employers.

Unless you actually send him an address to pay to (which makes no sense when you are using LBC, since escrow protection would be the only reason you use LBC instead of dealing direct), then no, they don't see any of your addresses.

Everything is done on localbitcoins once the deal is open, so there isn't really any on-chain activity that goes on anyways. It makes no sense for Localbitcoins to disclose your deposit address to others when there is literally no point of doing so.

Also, if you're talking about bitcoin addresses in general, and not just your localbitcoins deposit address, then there is even less reason to worry. LBC has no way of knowing which addresses on the blockchain are yours in the first place, let alone being able to relay that information to others.

I honestly think that if you're talking about actual mass adoption, there is still a long way to go.

And I'm not sure whether 3-5 years is sufficient time for that to happen at all. It obviously makes sense for Bitpay themselves to minimise this figure as much as possible, as they are one of the key players in blockchain payments and want to make themselves look good.

Perhaps it will happen, or perhaps bitcoin's role will simply be a store of value that can also be used as a currency on an occasional basis for larger purchases. No one knows at this point, and it's honestly all speculation in terms of the amount of time that is going to take for mass adoption to happen. Even the figure of 3-5 years is no doubt arbitrary.

They are obviously not the "verified company" that they claim.

If you look at the investment page of their site, you will find the investment plans which would appear to be ponzi-like to even marginally experienced investors. In fact, they put so little effort into making their site that it doesn't even say the frequency of which the ROI will be generated.

The interesting part though is why there is three cloned sites of the same scam. There is no doubt that they are all connected, and teams are all fake. But why have three operating at once?


That still makes no sense with three completely identical sites. That claim would be easily debunked if it was every to be brought up.