It can "buy" you a peace of mind which is probably one of the most important aspects in life, at least for me. Not having to worry about money during situations without income is what we all aim to achieve.

You can either keep struggling your entire life with a mediocre salary that just gets the bills paid, or you try to put all your effort into becoming financially independent. People's mistake is that they settle for the first option.

With that first option it's difficult to be happy because you always think about what if this or that happens and I no longer have an income. It's horrible and stresses people out more and more every day, especially in current times.

That being said, we'll always suffer from something, regardless of how poor or rich you are. I am of believe that suffering while being financially independent is better than suffering with a mediocre salary.

It's not as bad as you think it is. Investors can and likely will go by allocating 1-5% of their portfolio to Bitcoin in order to hedge risks of the traditional market. It's the best way to move forward, especially in today's world.

The stock market is boiling around all time high levels with insane valuation ratios. Historically, the traditional market doesn't keep going up endlessly. It cycles through various phases and the next one is the correction.

It probably will result in a bear market lasting a year or two at the very least. The stock market is really a ticking time bomb as we speak, and it's waiting for the first institutions to unload billions worth of stocks triggering a domino effect.

If we go by the charts, the very first ICO activity pumped Ethereum to an all time high of $50 back in 2017 and we all know what happened after that. It was one hack of a run but unsustainable for obvious reasons.

People we're calling Arthur Hayes an idiot for calling Ethereum a double digit shitcoin, but suddenly everything starts to make sense for the same people with how it keeps tanking.

Must be part of it with how they raised more than 7 million ETH tokens. It's crazy to think that you grant your worst enemy, because that's what EOS is, so much control of circulating supply and voting power.

It may very well be that through proxy EOS will troll vote ETH development. They already decided to lower block rewards to 2ETH instead of 3ETH, which is a daring move if the price doesn't increase beyond previous levels.

It makes me wonder, are people really that ignorant to believe that you don't have to pay tax over crypto trading activities, or are they blindly assuming that because crypto is "anonymous" they can keep avoiding taxation.

Either way, everything over a certain amount is subject to taxation. The only difference is that the rates depend on what you are trading or holding, and in this specific case countries may have a different opinion on what Bitcoin is.

Not sure where you're from, but in some countries the difference between short term and long term gain taxation is quite significant. In my case ~22% is the highest tax rate for longer term gains. It seems to be an average figure.

Japan seems to be going crazy with 55%. That's straight theft.

Explains a lot why Coinbase rolled out SegWit support. Roger in a video once said that he regret not having invested in Coinbase back in the very early days, otherwise be would surely attempt to block it through Coinbase as well.

Everything he doesn't have as stake in swiftly upgrades to allow Bitcoin to scale as fast as possible, and unfortunately, I do think that you're right in this specific case. Blockchain.com could very well be the next BitPay.

60% of the industry is still using legacy format addresses, and while it's completely optional whether you support SegWit or not, you should at all times do what's the best for Bitcoin as the center of everything related to crypto.

While I'm not at all convinced of the actual impact of ETFs in the long term, I do strongly believe that an approval might initiate a speculative bull run that will last till the actual product becomes publicly accessible.

In other words, we'll get to experience a sell the news scenario just like what happened once it was clear that we for sure knew that the futures markets were reality. After CME went live, the price started to plummet logically.

I'm interested to see how the market will respond after yet another SEC delay. It's for sure that they won't approve an ETF and I see that more people finally start to realize that, so maybe there won't be that much of a selloff this month.

You're right. It was really the moment of frustration that got me winded up due to what he did at the very beginning. Violence is never a solution to anything, but I'm pretty certain that I would have thrown the a-hole word.

The only person who stood up to him as mentioned before in this thread is Richard Heart, but the discussion between them is pretty dated. I watched it entirely today and there are some interesting points that Roger couldn't refute.

If anyone is interested, here is the link to that discussion. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkbSrmsYJ9c

Fiat is actually the worst store of value that you can buy yourself into. If there is one pretty solid guarantee with fiat, then it's the fact that even after a year, the same amount of money will buy you less goods.

If you don't do anything to either keep stacking fiat, or hedge a large part of your net worth, you are basically accepting going through the process of wealth destruction. There is no other way to put it.

The average joes are programmed to think in a way that grants governments so much advantage over them, that it doesn't surprise me one single bit that we haven't seen any real progress throughout the last decades.

Fiat indeed won't go anywhere, but that's all good. People should never be forced to use one specific currency. For me Bitcoin is it, but if others like to keep using fiat, they have all the freedom to do so, even if others think it's bad.

I think the main part comes from the fact that Bitcoin has lost a tremendous amount of interest amongst noobs due to its steep entry point. Yes, you can buy a fraction of a whole coin, but people aren't interested in that.

It's a psychological battle that makes decent exchanges become shitcoin exchanges. You can use $1000 to buy 0.15BTC or you can use $1000 to buy a giant stack of much cheaper coins with higher short term gain potential.

The same basically applies to Ethereum. It has grown beyond the point where noobs no longer care about it and have shifted to EOS and all other smaller tokens. Bitcoin is the least speculative coin of them all.

I wish I was there. I have no patience for these silly con artists. I would have gladly walked on that stage and punched Roger as hard as I can to knock him out. He really deserves that for various reasons.

The time where people are nice to Roger should be over. It really does surprise me how everyone can stay calm like that while it boils my blood just by watching how Roger is acting like an idiot.

There is no way for anyone to have a normal debate with him how hes trying to whore himself on camera for attention. Poor Jimmy Song. I wish he had more balls and arrogance, both aspects you need against Roger.

That was actually pretty normal considering how upcoming the South Korean market was at that point. I have seen how much depth there was in the order books there. It was mind boggling.

What happens in Iran is just a joke overall with how there is next to no depth available, so one "larger" player unloading a couple of Bitcoins means the market will crash with 25% without any problems.

I remember there was an African country where the price was also heavily inflated, turns out, yet again the lack of depth. People need to look beyond that what news outlets want you to read.

The only reason you think current prices are low is because you compare them with how the price was at its peak last year. It's a false sense of market reality that makes people lose track of the actual situation right now.

Current prices are perfectly normal and may even turn out to be on the higher side in the coming months. People need to realize that during bear markets there isn't really all that much new money coming in.

I would even like to say that it's more likely that money is in the process of leaving the market. Crypto thrives on how it's being hyped up during rallies, and these rallies are pretty much not going to show up any time soon.

Just be realistic. You don't gain anything by acting overly bullish whilst hoping for a recovery, the only thing you're doing is stress out even more because of how the market isn't in the mood to recover.

It depends on the momentum, really. It has happened before that events that had no initial hype to them suddenly came to life months later because of how the mass started to pick up on it.

Currently the only reason people hype up ETFs is because of how they desperately hope to wipe out their on-paper losses. If the market kept going up instead of correcting people wouldn't even bother with ETFs.

Most people before the bull run didn't even know what an ETF was. It's really the momentum that makes or breaks certain events, and the bearish momentum makes people badly crave for an ETF.

Absolutely. It's almost surreal with how they aren't willing to upgrade their core business to serve a much wider audience. Their politics game is what will end up turning BitPay into AOL of the early internet years.

I get it, Roger Ver is afraid of competition since Litecoin is faster and cheaper to use than Bcash and even Bitcoin. He's an advocate of allowing people to use what's convenient for them, so yet again a pure contradiction.

If you intentionally block the process of having BitPay list faster and cheaper altcoins, you're just a dick. He's screwing over BitPay just to nurse his own toxic motives. May LN screw his ass over.

What did you expect? It's too much of a hassle for them to deal with Bitcoin since there is so much involved in securing and storing large amounts of it. We often don't realize how technical some of these practices are.

There has been an article not that long ago where Coinbase more or less demonstrated their process of generating keys and whatnot, and it really does look like it actually scares off large legacy players.

Overall, the less these institutions need to use the underlying asset, the less incentive there is for them to mess with this market. Yes, it won't sky rocket the price as some would have hoped, but these people miss the point of Bitcoin.

It depends on the content largely, and whether or not the site does something involving crypto deposits and withdrawals. As long as you remain somewhat neutral, there is less reason for others to attack your site.

The thing is that web hosters are too afraid of future regulations and for that reason unnecessarily bother people with new policies that don't have any real use right now, all to avoid being sanctioned or fined at a later point.

Great thing about web hosters is that they allow you to move your domains and whatnot, so in case one isn't doing what you want it to do, hop over to the next best option. There are plenty enough alternatives.

Erik is just about making money in the end, it's not a charity service he offers out of love for the crypto community. He'll do what's the best option for his business and in this case it's a measure forced upon them.

I do think less people will use their service due to all this, but I also think the group of hardcore Shapeshift users will stick with it regardless of how severe the implemented measures are.

If people are okay with handing their private information over to scummy ICOs for investment purposes, they will definitely not shy away from handing over the same private information to a reputable exchanging service.

Unless you have insider information about an event that will for sure affect the market, or you're a market marker yourself, there is no such a thing as being absolutely sure about trading, especially not when it comes to crypto.

Also, most realistic traders always assume that they are wrong just because of the fact that they don't know what they are doing. Even with technical analysis you are still hoping to be right, so that somewhat reeks of gambling.

Overall, there are so many different levels of greed, that you some times wonder why people keep using leverage with crypto. Crypto by nature is insanely volatile already, so why is there a need to go beyond that?

With stocks and traditional assets I can definitely understand that people want to boost their gains with leverage, but with crypto it's way over the top in my opinion. But then again, maybe I'm being too conservative here.

The mainstream media is the first to report every single bit of trash, but in case it turns out to be fake news (as Goldman Sachs CFO called it), they suddenly think it's no longer important to make people aware of it.

Just goes to show how they are only out to trash talk Bitcoin in an attempt to have average joes stay away. I'm glad that people started to massively down vote and dislike all their content recently, and rightfully so.

Someone on whatsapp linked me to one of these articles to find out what I think about it. I countered his question to know what he thinks about it, and he considered it to be very bad news for Bitcoin.

It took me a while to tell him how the mainstream media works, and I'm happy to have helped that person to calm down. It's our job to help out rookies where we can to have them be the next generation of firm hodlers.

If you have to repeat yourself, just keep doing it. Helping at least one person is way better than helping no one, even if you think it's a waste of time. Just go through with it.

Spot on. I see people constantly refer to other coins as a waste of resources, which in most cases they are right on, but the few occasions where they are wrong helps this industry to remain fairly well distributed overall.

It was quite a bitter pill to swallow seeing how Ethereum literally broke through last year. No matter how hard I tried to convince people that they were buying themselves into fraudulent ICOs, it was a total waste of effort.

I have been part of this market for a while, but I have never seen anything like the ICO explosion before. It took so much attention away from Bitcoin at that point, that I'm glad the parasitic ICO problem more or less solved itself.