After Bitcoin Gold, I stopped paying attention to new Bitcoin forks. I figured that other people would lose interest just like I did. I read this article on Arstechnica earlier today. Apparently a bunch of other forks are scheduled or already happened, and the markets (including futures) indicate that they do carry some value.

According to the article, the following forks are in the works. I think in some cases, the snapshot already happened:


Does anyone have any info on the above forks? Snapshot Block #, whether there are working (safe) wallets and a live network, what exchanges they are traded on? I'm hesitant to bother moving my coins and sacrificing privacy to claim fork coins when they aren't worth much. But both Bcash and Bgold were a boon to my portfolio, so I'm curious.

That's just a daily chart. I'm looking for vertical action on the monthly chart. After all, this move has basically taken a year to climax in parabolic leg. Still no blow-off candle with huge range indicative of incoming carnage. Here's a comparison to 2013 (sorry for the horrible resolution):



Another thing: check the altcoin charts. ETH, BCH, XLM, even DOGE are all standing at attention and starting to push upwards during this last BTCUSD dip. That suggests that money is flowing into altcoins. During a real crash, altcoins crash as well as everyone exits to cash.

I'm pretty sure they already have. The commercial banks have been filing blockchain patents for years now, building prototypes. And just as we see Bank of America signalling a move into the cryptocurrency exchange market, Goldman Sachs announced that they will be clearing BTC futures contracts for their clients.

A report from JP Morgan Chase released a few days ago says that Bitcoin could become a new gold-like asset, suggesting that it could become entrenched in the world markets like gold, oil and other trusted commodities.


I think we'll see governments scrambling in every direction. This is a completely new animal to them. Morocco banned the use of cryptocurrencies; so did Vietnam. Meanwhile, regulated futures markets are opening in the United States. That seems more telling to me than anything else.

Thanks for this. I'm tired of the "When $20k?" and "When $50k?" and "Will Bitcoin hit $70k this year?" threads.

I'm pretty terrified to sell and I plan to hold through the top and will just start shorting after the major dead cat bounce. I'm sort of a delusional bull long term, but I'm tired and I want to see the late bulls bleed.

Mom and Dad panic buying BTC at $17k?! That's just asking for blood! Bring back Karhu!


Yeah, this isn't done yet. I'd be surprised if we don't go vertical towards the $25,000 area. This needs a blow-off top. What signs are you looking for as far as a longer term top?

I'm not so sure about that. Firstly, you have to consider time frames. Novogratz predicted last month that Bitcoin would end the year around $10,000. So for all I know, he expects a significant correction from this latest leg of the rally.

Also, JP Morgan seems to be pivoting quickly. They said a few days ago that Bitcoin could join Gold as a reliable, long-term way to store wealth, suggesting that it would become a traditional asset class. Jamie Dimon may not like it, but I don't think he wants Chase left in the dust by other banks. Goldman Sachs announced today that they are planning to clear bitcoin futures for clients as new contracts go live in the coming days. Bank of America just won a patent for a cryptocurrency exchange system.

The banks are waking up, and it seems like they want a piece of the action more than anything else.....

It's pretty natural as far as Bitcoin goes. Its charts resemble Gartner hype cycles more than anything else I've seen, so I honestly wasn't surprised to see it blow through $10,000 like nothing. We hadn't even gone vertical yet, no signs of a blow-off top. And I still don't think we've seen the signs yet. I want to see a fat range on the monthly like 2013. Let's do 400% in a month. Then dump it!


I'm completely terrified. It's so weird how this price action just frays my nerves constantly. It's exhausting. It's really weird, but I would honestly prefer that it just crashes soon, even though my portfolio will take a big hit.

Kraken's infrastructure performs horribly under load. The CEO admitted as much just last month. He said there is a major update coming this month that will mitigate all the downtime, but I'm not holding my breath.


If you insist on BTC/EUR, the most reputable and trustworthy option is GDAX. It is not incredibly liquid for high volume traders because they segregate the USD and EUR liquidity pools -- only European and UK traders can use the EUR markets. The BTC/EUR market had ~9000 BTC volume yesterday. SEPA is available. One of the upsides of GDAX is that right now, they still have 0% fee on limit orders.

I would say that all exchanges are facing performance issues with the current volume and volatility, though. GDAX is no exception, but they are far superior to Kraken.


Unfortunately, Kraken definitely has GDAX beat here. Only BTC, ETH and LTC are currently available. However, it's pretty obvious that they are in the process of adding new coin markets.

Why are you using an IP whitelist? Too many things can go wrong. If your router dies and needs to be replaced, this will change your IP address. With options like UDP and TOTP authorization in addition to email authentication, I just don't see the value in IP whitelisting.

With some exchanges like BTC-e, I've seen people locked out for weeks over this (if they could even manage to get through to support). I can't comment on Bitfinex, personally. I left after the hack last year and never returned.


After their reaction to Bitfinex'd and the community concerns over Tether, I'm more wary of this exchange by the day. Instead of providing the audits we all want to see, they continue to evade and are now threatening critics with lawsuits. That comes off very shady.

I also lost money in the hack last year, and I certainly don't feel I was "repaid" by their debt token scheme....

Don't confuse Segwit with Segwit2x. Segwit was already activated on the network months ago. Technically, the Lightning Network didn't even require Segwit, but all Lightning code to date was written around it because it addressed transaction malleability. The miners didn't support Segwit2x because they're rational and realized that the community didn't support it.


I guess you could see it like that. Coins are locked up while you have payment channels open. LN nodes are similar to masternodes in that they collect fees to facilitate LN transactions. It could have a similar economic effect: coins are locked up in LN --> less liquidity/supply --> price increases.


Any guess when we'll see publicly available wallets?

Trying to understand the correlation between altcoins and Bitcoin is tricky. It's a fickle relationship. Usually when Bitcoin rises fast (like now), altcoins drop in value as people exit altcoin markets to hold BTC. When coins are in an accumulation phase, they will often hold their value against USD but fall against BTC. We're seeing a mass exit in alt/BTC markets as people chase Bitcoin's rally (with a few exceptions). This can even spill over into dumping alt/fiat markets (like ETHUSD) because the Bitcoin fomo is so strong.


I doubt it has much to do with Crypto Kitties. There is significant network congestion and rising transaction fees (much like Bitcoin), but it's the negative correlation to Bitcoin that's killing its price. The fear of missing out on BTC's gains is causing most coins to bleed out. My portfolio is less than 20% alts, and I've bled buckets today.....

That's too bad. I can understand their position. Games are pretty low-value, so network congestion/fees are making this untenable. Hopefully with the Lightning Network on the way, they'll come around when it makes sense for them. I don't fault any business for doing what's best for their model. I'd happily open a payment channel directly with Steam or their payment processor to prevent this sort of thing.


What should we expect, though? Satoshi acknowledged that if Bitcoin went mainstream that they'd probably be worth millions a piece. You expect rational people not to try to ride that wave? When I read the "Incentives" section of the whitepaper, I get the impression that fees (as denominated in bitcoins) are supposed to go up since the block subsidy is dropping. It's in the design. It's not my fault that some crazies are paying $14k a piece.


The Interac eTransfer could get reversed. So there's that. Maybe Bitcoin doesn't work that well as a payment system. To be a store of value, there needs to be transaction liquidity; people need to transact. Otherwise it's just a dead economy that no one can exit. But it seems that in spite of the rising fees, transaction volume continues to rise. Why? Maybe its function isn't low-cost payments after all.


Are you calling the top here?

This is extremely dubious. It has "exit scam" written all over it. This is 2017, and endless Bitcoin services have claimed over years that they -- against proper security procedures -- kept everything in a hot wallet and were subsequently "hacked." Does anyone even believe these claims anymore?

Today, even newbies are being taught to use hardware wallets because of the dangers of holding BTC on internet-connected machines. There is absolutely no excuse for an operation of Nicehash's size and reputation to keep > 4000 BTC in a hot wallet. I don't believe this for a second. Is there any information about the owners? Where is the company located?

It's not going to affect the BTCUSD market. The price continues to push new all-time highs as we speak, hours after the news dropped. The losses are estimated at ~$60 million, which is paltry compared to the overall market.

However, I will say that NiceHash was the most reputable cloud mining service. I know a couple altcoin miners that regular rent hash rate from them, and I'm guessing they were affected by this. It will definitely send some shockwaves through altcoin and miner communities, and it will probably have some effect on POW altcoin hash rates.

I'm skeptical about the circumstances. It sounds like they kept their bitcoin holdings all online on a live server. That's violating security 101 for an operation as large as NiceHash. It starts to smell like an exit scam....

According to Lightning Labs, ACINQ and Blockstream, Lightning transactions are now being tested on the live Bitcoin network. Notably, this means that several different Lightning software implementations are now interoperable, which was a major development hurdle to overcome. The specifications for version 1 of the Lightning Network are now established standards.


It's definitely a major step in bringing the Lightning Network closer to reality, although there is still much work to be done. Before Bitcoin users can start using LN, the developers of the various LN implementations need to produce beta software for the mainnet. From the Coindesk article:

My reading of the ruling is that you must have had $20,000 worth of transactions in any one year during the 2013-2015 period to be reported. Based on what you said, this doesn't affect you. And technically, even if Coinbase did give your info to the IRS, that info wouldn't prove that capital gains occurred since you didn't sell them on Coinbase.

That said, companies like Coinbase and Gemini work closely with law enforcement and regulators and they are tightly regulated since they are based in the US. They comply with individual requests from the IRS all the time. So you should always be ready for your exchange activity to be given to the IRS.....

We don't have enough information here to determine what happened. You didn't say, but I assume nothing ever arrived in your Coinbase account, right?

Funds disappearing and reappearing in the Jaxx wallet is not unheard of. It's very glitchy and unreliable; I recommend against it. For a lightweight BTC wallet, I recommend Electrum, which doesn't experience those kind of issues.


To confirm what happened, could you post your Coinbase deposit address and the Transaction ID# in your Jaxx withdrawal history? Then we can check on the blockchain what happened, because it sounds like the funds were already sent and confirmed.

The US government interprets jurisdiction based on operational presence (corporate registrations, headquarters), jurisdiction of customers, or both. If you read the BTC-e indictment, the DOJ established that BTC-e offering services to Americans partially formed the basis for charging them:

From page 2 of the indictment:


Online businesses are supposed to apply for licenses where they operate (read: where their customers reside) if their business requires licensing. In many cases, licenses are not required. However, money services businesses (or equivalent) are required to be registered and licensed in many jurisdictions, such as the US.

Whether or not an exchange should obtain a license is a matter of risk analysis. The likelihood of enforcement actions is usually the main factor in deciding whether to get the proper licenses.

How far back does the BETI data go? Is it based on historical Bitstamp data, or is there data that goes back further? I'm curious what sample size we're talking about. If that's really the case based on a decent sample, I'll be tempted to sells some coins to rebuy when the crash happens.

$20,000 to $1200 would be a 94% drop. From $50,000 it would be a 98% drop. We would definitely create a whole new generation of salty bagholders and "bitcoins are tulips" naysayers if that happened. I have my doubts, but you give me some hope that cheap coins aren't gone forever.


Only $5K? The bounce after the 2013 bubble pop went from $381 - $995. Nearly a 78% fib retracement. I would expect at least a tag of the 61.8% fib before we enter a downtrend.

I don't believe that Hong Kong is relevant anymore. There used to be some parent company registrations there and supposedly some operations are still run from HK. But if you read Bitfinex's terms, all services are governed by British Virgin Islands law. BVI regulators haven't done anything for the same reason Bitfinex sought jurisdiction there. BVI is a rubber stamp regulator, like many independent island nations. They rarely enforce any laws against anyone. For anything.


Whether Bitfinex is in compliance with BVI law is irrelevant when it comes to the US government waving its dick around. Compliance in the British Virgin Islands =/= Bitfinex is safe from regulatory or law enforcement action from other governments. Just look at BTC-e. Bitfinex offered services to US users since 2013, so the US government can/will claim jurisdiction if they want to come after Bitfinex.


Supposedly. More importantly, BTC-e was also indicted for operating an unlicensed money service business, something that Bitfinex did in the USA for several years.

I'm open to contrarian viewpoints, and frankly I'd love to see this happen. It's getting harder and harder to accumulate BTC, so a 75% drop from here sounds like a godsend.

Regarding pattern extrapolation, though: If we could expect 80-95% price drops the last couple times around, chances are that we can't expect such deep crashes next time. That's just my experience. Everyone thinks bubble pop = an easy 5x on their coins, so it probably won't happen this time.