Which one? There's so many of them on coinmarketcap right now!

In other news, a bit early to call it a dead cat bounce yet, isn't it?

So far I'm not aware of any viable concepts for creating a blockchain-less cryptocurrency that doesn't rely on centralized entities for either token issuance, transaction security or even both. And I'm sure it's not for lack of trying.



Before the mempool was congested as it is now 0-conf transactions were viable for most use cases were fast transactions were of essence, allowing for basically instant transactions. With the development of Lightning Network we'll get instant transactions again by being able to use payment channels.



Trusted counterparties simply send you your coins back if justified, so you can already do that. It's just that you don't have a third party able to enforce such a return transaction for you.

Making transactions reversible by default without both parties consenting or involving a third party as arbiter makes a payment method useless.



Any PoX process requires expenditure of resources in one way or another. Thus there will always be "inequality".

If you are referring to ASIC vs GPU/CPU mining -- there are plenty of alternatives out there.



Unmanageable how?

BTC dominance is a rather useless metric, especially since new alts keep popping up by the hundreds. Things only get interested if any of the top 5 coins get close to BTC's market cap, as was briefly the case with ETH last summer. Question being whether it's going to be ETH again or one of the contestants that are trying to give BTC a run for its money.



Here's the thing about regulation and privacy focused cryptos though: I'm not sure whether an increase of regulation would be all that positive for anonymous coins, given that stronger regulation may force exchanges to explicitely delist non-traceable cryptocurrencies.

They could charge for that, but that would simply drive people away to other exchanges that don't. Traditional exchanges and brokers usually don't charge for unfilled orders either.

Note that this is also the reason why you should largely ignore buy and sell walls and why market depth can hardly be trusted.

You omitted looking at the Demand side of things, which by itself can be broken up in 2 factors

i) Community -- The larger the community behind a cryptocurrency, the more people involved, the higher the demand. Bitcoin's community has vastly grown over the years.

ii) Availability -- The ease of buying a cryptocurrency. While exchanges are currently overwhelmed with verifying new customers, it has never been so easy to buy cryptocurrencies.


On a higher level I would also add Trustworthiness: The more people trust in a cryptocurrency, the less prone they are to panic selling, making for a stabler market.

Lightning Network has different dev teams working on it than Bitcoin itself. Some developers work on both. LN does not get added to the Bitcoin blockchain and it does not require a modification of the Bitcoin protocol. Rather it will require the use of new clients (ie. wallets) that know how to open Lightning channels and how to handle Lightning transactions.

Deployment is happening as we speak with the first few people running Lightning nodes on mainnet. This means LN is already live, however using it is not recommended for the average user yet as LN still needs to be thoroughly tested and improved.

The MtGox crash was just a minor setback though, another bull market soon followed. What really triggered crypto winter was when China cracked down on Bitcoin in late 2013. Sounds familiar?

I'm ATH agnostic right now (ie. I don't expect one to happen this year, but also wouldn't be surprised if it did), but to be honest a cool down of 2-3 years would be fine with me. Right now there's too much of a focus on price and getting rich quick. A new crypto winter would thin out both alts and speculators and give devs some time to work on protocol improvements without everyone breathing down their necks and pushing rhetorics in front of technological concerns.

That seems to be the approach that HTLC.me is following. It's fine with testnet coins, but I'm still not sure how to feel about mainnet on-chain transactions taking place without user interaction. I guess in the end people will have multiple implementations to choose from, depending on how much convenience vs control they want.




Yep, just get testnet bitcoins from one of the faucets. Here for example:

https://testnet.manu.backend.hamburg/faucet

In Eclair swipe to the leftmost screen for your testnet address (starts with 2...) and once you got some coins swipe to the rightmost screen and open a new channel by tapping on the big green plus button. Autoconnect should suffice for the first try.

Once the connection is confirmed (ie. the channel state says "normal") you can send lightning transactions from the main screen by scanning payment requests -- eg. on yalls.org or by creating a payment request for yourself on the HTLC.me web wallet.

Oh this post aged well, good call OP!

Who knows, maybe USD 10,000,- will hold after all, but things look rather grim right now.



Bubble or no bubble, I'm getting my popcorn ready. No matter if it ends up in an epic recovery or a pluge to despair, it's going to be a rollercoaster either way. Enjoy the ride, folks.

What do you mean? Lightning Network on Bitcoin is opt-in, you can still use on-chain transactions as before. The Bitcoin protocol itself doesn't change.

Not sure how Lightning Network will apply to MimbleWimble though, as I haven't fully wrapped my head around MimbleWimble itself yet. Also it appears to be still in a very early phase of implementation.

Interesting find. Not that I would read much into it, but a similar seasonal pattern could be seen a couple of decades ago in traditional stock markets during december -- as fond managers were bringing their books in order while closing their yearly accounts and selling speculative assets for more conservative investments.

Of course this pattern only lasted as long as no one was aware of it. Once word got out people started trading accordingly and the pattern was no more. Given how young the crypto market is you might be onto a similar phenomena that no one (publicly) noticed so far.

The good thing is you will now be proven right no matter what happens next year: If the pattern persists you are right because you were able to call it. If it doesn't, it's because people noticed your thread and are now trading accordingly.

Nah... I mean it's possible, of course, but I have to concur with TheQuin that USD 10,000,- is going to be a tough support to shatter. Even after that I think the lowest we can go would be USD 6,000,-.

I don't dare making any upside predictions though. The last year of Bitcoin has been beyond any of my expectations given the timeframe.



Correlation does not imply causation.

Still, I too think that exchanges are one of the major bottlenecks right now. Hard to get fresh liquidity into the market if exchanges take half an eternity for verification. Might be for the better in the long run though, as anyone who's rushing into Bitcoin right now has probably not put much thought into it. So anyone who's waiting to get verified right now has some time to ponder on whether they really want to enter the market.

I think another factor are alts though. It seems like a lot of new speculators flock towards alts right now, hoping to invest in the next Bitcoin. That probably won't end well.

When the king falls, the alts follow. I'm still skeptic about whether the current BTC drop was caused by South Korea, but it's interesting to see yet another example of how alts only thrive when Bitcoin is stable.



So is South Korea now shutting down exchanges or what? After initially threatening with a ban, then revoking said statement, we're now back at threatening with a ban again? Or is this is simply the same old rehashed news story? Not that I care much but damn is this situation confusing. I guess these kinds of plays will continue until we run out of countries banning Bitcoin.

A bit early to call the bottom, isn't it? I too am fairly confident that the USD 11,000 - 10,000 levels will hold, but I don't think we're in the clear yet. Bitcoin's movements have been too twitchy for the past few weeks. The market needs to stabilize first before we can move onward.

What about peer-to-peer trading using social channels? Is that still a thing in China or was this only an intermediate solution by the Chinese crypto community?



The way I understand it decentralized exchanges only enable you to trade tokens of the respective blockchain that they are based on, or am I mistaken? Because this unfortunately significantly narrows down the selection of tradeable assets.

I love seeing how much work is being done on decentralized exchanges, but as long as these constraints apply their utility is rather limited.

Anonymous in theory, but I guess it remains to be seen how this looks in practice.

Anonymity in LN works in that only you and your counterparty are aware of how funds are being moved, with external observers seeing only the opening and the closing (on-chain) state. LN nodes along the way only know their in- and outgoing transactions, without being aware of the start and end point of the channel. So from a technical point of view, privacy is ensured.

However other kinds of attacks are thinkable, such as correlating opening / closing states with information that could be gathered by controlling multiple nodes across the network. Question being how feasible such an attack would be.

Either way, privacy is definitely improved when using LN. Not sure how it will compare to privacy focused coins though, although admittedly even with privacy focused coins there's still little known about how secure in terms of privacy they really are.

Oh he's definitely right. Any attempt at regulating cryptocurrencies on a local level is doomed to fail in the long run. Loose regulation, sure, but heavy regulation will require international accord.

And seeing how nations are not even remotely able to fix international tax loop holes I don't see this happening any time soon. There's no way the global economy will find a consent on how to regulate cyptocurrencies "the right way". So governments will have to find the sweet spot between regulating cryptocurrencies in a way that helps creating a solid legal foundation, while not acting so heavy handed that it simply drives people, companies and thus tax money into countries that are more liberal in their regulation.

Beautiful, ain't it.

If you call that a crash you're in for a treat. It's true that China shut down exchanges, but that was already 4-5 months ago and only affected Bitcoin in the short term. What you are seeing right now is a market consolidation after BTC went crazy due to breaking USD 10,000,-. Things might get worse from here, but it's not the end of the world.

Welcome to crypto.

Get yourself a hardware wallet, either a Trezor or Ledger Nano S. Both are as secure as it can get and easier to use than other options such as paper wallets or using an airgapped (= offline) device for cold storage. Buy the hardware wallet directly from the manufacturer (via trezor.io or ledgerwallet.com respectively) and avoid eBay offers like a plague.

Electrum does not store your private keys on a 3rd party server, it merely uses a 3rd party server to access the blockchain so that you don't have to download the whole thing. Electrum is just as secure (or insecure) as the Bitcoin Core (= Bitcoin Qt) wallet. Both wallets are insecure in that every device that is connected to the internet may fall to malware sooner or later, which is why hardware wallets, paper wallets or airgapped devices are recommended.

Seriously? The market grows astronomically for more than a year and it's accepted as normal. The market stops growing -- it's not even dropping at that point -- and all of a sudden things smell fishy? O.o

Markets are cyclical, they don't just grow indefinitely without setbacks. Booms and busts. It's how markets behave.