Why would bitcoin fall when USD falls? Bitcoin is not backed by some fiat. These two currencies are not interlinked in any major way, in fact bitcoin is completely independent from the US dollar as opposed to a lot of national currencies.

In fact, I would imagine that if there were indeed hyperinflation in USD alone which is unlikely looking at it right now, or somehow the USD exchange rate plummets which is again, unlikely, then BTC should go up in terms of USD due to the fact that its real value should not change as its supply has not changed, at least noticeably.

You're wrong about bitcoin's value coming from limited coins, though. I believe that similar gold, bitcoin's value derives from its ability to serve as global online currency, and people's trust in it as the first decentralised crypto. This value shouldn't be affected by fiat movement.

I don't necessarily think that it's because the older generation is not technology literate, even though the vast majority of them have less IT skills compared to the young generations, but rather the fact that they are not able to grasp the idea of decentralisation.

That's why we see so many older generations blindly trust in fiat currency and call bitcoin a scam. If you don't understand the very concept that bitcoin is based upon and how exactly bitcoin is structured to work, you're obviously not going to trust it, and if you don't trust it, you're not going to adopt it.

Younger generations that are more open to new ideas are more likely to see BTC's potential to solve some of the problems with centralisation, fiat, and expensive transfers being facilitated by banks. They will thus be the drivers of mass adoption if it ever happens, which is something positive in the long run.

I never thought of it that way. If anything, it shows how much a nation is hungry for cheap and on demand credit.

It's simply not logical to think that economic development can be reflected through the use of a single financial instrument, that is pretty much available anywhere in the world. It's not even something that requires advanced information technology in order to implement.

High levels of credit card debt only show that a country is spending beyond their means and the credit card company is doing a good job of implementing and promoting their product, and probably making bank. But imo, there is nothing more than that to it.

In a perfect world, we'd have decentralised marketplaces like this as you mention. But honestly I doubt that it's going to be feasible in the near future. I absolutely agree with avikz as well. A decentralised marketplace doesn't necessarily mean that you're directly interacting with the manufacturer.

It'll be hard to disrupt this market due to people's familiarity with dealing with centralised marketplaces. Also, how exactly will the middleman be cut without having holes in the system that is open for exploitation will still need time to develop, imho.

What I think is most likely is that the traditional marketplaces will in fact respond to increased crypto adoption by integrating it into their services further, such as accepting it as a form of payment or even using blockchain as a ledger to keep records. But a truly decentralised marketplace seems like a far fetched idea for now.

I would not use any escrows that are off the forum and you haven't heard of.

This one is an obvious scam to anyone that has the slightest experience with dealing with crypto escrows. The thing is that there is only a handful of escrows that I would come to remotely trusting, possibly Bitify being one of them and even for that one I'd be extremely cautious with large amounts.

All the rest of the escrows that have absolutely no branding, you have no idea about, and someone is recommending you to use in a deal with them is just a scam, no doubt about it. It wouldn't be surprising if your "buyers" were in with this scam as well, working together with a team of scammers and/or owning the site itself.

There was never really a crypto ban per se.

I think there was an article that has been recently in the news as well that stated exactly that, that a Chinese court ruled that holding bitcoin as private property as well as other cryptocurrencies is completely fine. Of course, when it comes to mining and organised exchanges things are a lot tougher, but p2p exchange is still possible and so is holding and transacting in BTC.

Whose fault exactly this blunder was doesn't matter, but I don't really see China switching their stance any time soon regarding crypto. They've made it clear that they don't want to regulate the field but rather want to either issue centralised cryptos themselves, or simply restrict access to cryptos to the fullest possible extent.

To me, this correction would have happened no matter what.

The BCH hard fork as well as other factors simply accelerated this dip. But the main thing is that we're in a bear market, and everything that is slightly negative becomes magnified and all of a sudden causes concern within investors who panic dump due to the feeling of uncertainty. That's how I view this current dump.

I could see bitcoin going further down before its rebound, possibly to the $3k to $4k level since a 80-85% retraction before the recovery comes seems to be the common trend over the past few bear markets. Don't get caught up in the emotions, in my opinion. Right now, going against the market sentiment and buying over chunks would be my strategy.

Initially, you marketed yourselves as an anonymous exchange and that was what most people used your service under the impression that your service guaranteed anonymity.

I think that this is misleading advertising at best and very shady business operations in general.

Why are you not able to return the funds which Privcoin sent you back to the same sending address? Since you are not exchanging any funds but rather just conducting a crypto to crypto transfer, to the best of my knowledge, that should not be something that is illegal in any state. I would also trust that Privcoin's claim that there are no specific legislation preventing you to complete the exchange to be true.

Anyhow, seems like all of these instant exchangers (shapeshift, changenow, changelly) have all become stricter with their KYC with Changenow and Changelly's reputation being much worse. I would be extremely careful about dealing with all of them.

I really doubt that banks would be completely replaced in the future by blockchain technology alone. In fact, banks could even integrate blockchain technology into their operations in the future to streamline their operations and improve security and efficiency which I've mentioned in my previous posts.

Having said that, bitcoin and other decentralised cryptocurrencies could potentially take some of the market share from banks, especially with the niche market of online, global transaction processing.

In my opinion decentralised cryptos are just so much cheaper, easier, and more timely than the services that banks offer such as SWIFT transfers, and that's not even mentioning the fact that fiat currency is completely avoided and rather a long term store of value is being transacted. But overthrowing banks? Don't think so. They still will deal with things that cryptocoins alone wouldn't be able to do, like lending out loans, investments, etc.

Just to touch on the topic once more: I think that as a business, you should try to minimise or at least make the KYC process as easy for the customer as possible, and only if you absolutely need their information and/or required by law to collect them.

The thing is that a lot of your customers will get discouraged from using your service if you're over the top about your KYC procedures. And that's obviously bad for an exchange, or any other crypto business.

Of course, what is required by law is required by law and you have to obey that. But make sure to protect their privacy, don't abuse know your customer as a means of threatening people, or otherwise you risk your business's reputation being ruined. Check with the authorities what is needed, whether source of funds are also needed (aml), and if you're not experienced I'd probably go with a third party KYC provider.

I've been saying this for quite a while now - I fully expect prices to dip further in this bear market down to around $4-5k potentially. That seems like the trend from the past bear markets where prices have gone down similar percentages before recovering.

Apparently, the price dip was due to people selling off coins for tax reasons but I don't think that it can be solely attributed to that alone. The bearish sentiments certainly acted as a catalyst in this dip.

$5k is likely as a bottom but we don't know whether bitcoin will have a short term rebound this time just like the previous few times, or actually fall through the $6k support. Anyhow, if you do have spare funds at this stage to invest, I would do so wisely as I believe we are close to the floor for this bear market. Recovery for the next bull market is still quite distant right now, I expect that to happen mid to late next year.

This has been an excuse that has been used over and over again.

If you can't even bother changing the team member's pictures to the correct ones, you just demonstrated exactly how untrustworthy you guys are with investors funds. And the fact that you guys can't even realise this huge fault in your website but have to have a scam accusation launched against you to respond is ridiculous.

More likely than not, you guys know exactly what you're doing. The team is fabricated from the start intentionally, and removing the team pics now won't help. I'd still be comfortable with labelling FTKA a scam given their shady behaviour and the poorly designed site that clearly the devs didn't put a lot of effort in.

There are absolutely no signs that this is going to happen. It didn't happen last week which is what you initially predicted, and probably won't happen in the foreseeable future.

The $6k support is still relatively strong and seems like that we're going to be essentially stuck in this position for quite a while as the markets consolidate. While it is possible that the support doesn't hold up at one point and a dip comes to the market, that is completely expected in a bear market and simply won't be anything surprising like the collapse that you speak of.

A full on collapse is simply not possible at this stage in my opinion. Prices would not collapse below $3-4k due to the buying pressure in that range. Bitcoin's potential in the long term is not affected one bit by this bear market, keep that in mind.

I think that a lot of people here are misunderstanding what you mean by a stablecoin. I think what you mean is simply reduced fluctuation within bitcoin which is obviously very possible in the future with more adoption and larger market cap.

The whole reason why bitcoin is so volatile right now as opposed to something like gold which is quite similar in nature is because the markets are not yet fully mature and the market capitalisation is still extremely small compared to traditional precious metals, which is small themselves in the grand scheme of things. Investment and adoption into the bitcoin technology will definitely lead to more short term stability.

But BTC will never be truly stable relative to fiat. That's just what you get with decentralised money. Obviously, it would be a different story if merchants in the future start to price everything directly in BTC.

Very difficult to say whether this will happen or not.

For me, it doesn't really matter. I'm looking at this bear market right now as an opportunity to dollar cost average and accumulate as much coins as I can, at a rate of under $7k which I believe will look like a steal in the long term.

If the markets do get overheated again like the 2018 bull market which is quite likely, I would sell some (obviously difficult to predict where exactly it's going to end up) as everyone starts to FOMO and mainstream media turns bullish again, while buying back in after the bull market passes. But the general strategy is still holding in my opinion, I'm not rushed to sell due to the fact that I got in relatively early for the majority of my BTC, and I do believe in a possible increased adoption rate in the near future.

How many changes of tunes does he need in order to get the right prediction?

I guess everyone simply rushes to the good news whenever a prediction becomes correct, but what they ignore is that the predictions which these self proclaimed experts make are constantly shifting, and old ones essentially become void and gets never talked about again.

This is exactly what is happening with Novogratz. He knows that he was wrong about the super bullish $40k prediction, and shifted his stance to bearishness, then reshifted again. That's why I absolutely never listen to these people, they don't even use TA in most instances and even if they do, it's worthless pieces of information. Everyone has their own agendas and their own storyline or narrative to tell.

Anyhow, I don't think it's very likely that we'll see the bull run happen this quickly, I believe that the majority of next year will still be quite sluggish.

Almost all of these points are either improbable, unlikely, or downright doesn't make sense.

Firstly, who is going to stop bitcoin being used for illegal purposes? Obviously, it's not going to be something that anyone within the community would want, but you can't just limit crime like that. It's like saying that the USD should only be used for legal purposes, well of course, but it's impossible to enforce and just doesn't make sense to try.

The government is very unlikely to hold support for any decentralised cryptocurrency in the near future, they may look towards national cryptos but I expect their attitude towards decentralised cryptos to not change much. As such, adoption will have to happen at an individual level imo. In all honesty, governments around the world should look to regulate the crypto industry as opposed to restricting access to it, as they would be able to access so much more revenue that way.

I doubt very much that they have actually raised the amount that they claim on their website. Some legitimate projects don't even raise $200k+ let alone some random site that has just popped up that is clearly a scam.

It's a bit of a joke really, with "Samantha" as a team member.

You really need to look no further than the claims that they are making - they are essentially trying to solve the problems faced by multinational tech companies like Youtube etc. by saying that "blockchain will solve everything", without much explanation as to why. They also promise passive income after you invest, raising huge red flags. Not only is this a scam, it might be a ponzi as well.

Has happened before and probably will happen in the future again.

$10,000 is a threshold that most of us will never come close to in terms of crypto trading, so I don't think that there is anything that average buyers or sellers will have to worry with that. Their volume is much much higher than what most people are trading at.

Not to mention their ties with overseas money laundering, tax evasion, etc. No surprise whatsoever that he's been caught doing this. Of course, do be careful with even moderate amounts of bitcoin sales if you're not asking for KYC, anyone is able to use that excuse to catch you and claim that it was "unlicensed".

There is still relatively little actual merchant adoption to say that bitcoin will stop being volatile any time soon.

But in my opinion, this volatility is absolutely nothing bad. In the long run, we know that bitcoin is going to be a store of value and thus hold up its real value relatively well against the CPI. The volatility is only something that is a short term phenomenon.

What volatility suggests to me is not only is it something that speculators are able to draw upon. That to me isn't really a positive. But rather, the fact that it's volatile means that it's completely separate from the fiat system due to its decentralised nature, which is exactly what bitcoin was initially designed to do. If bitcoin ever became pegged to the USD or move extremely close to it, I think that the adopters will in fact be extremely disappointed as it suggests that fiat has gained a significant influence over prices.